*That* is why I like Linux. Linux is fun. Well put.
It's not just the fun that you get when you have a witty and skilled tech writer, nor is it the fun of a video game.
Linux is just plain fun to use, to hack on, to code for, and to set up systems with.
It was made by a lot of people that were having a terrible amount of *fun* making something, and that kind of attitude just pervades everything. It doesn't have a musty pervasive sense of marketing, of lies about TCO and ROI, of a carefully-maintained-and-pristine image. The people that made Linux felt that it was okay to criticize parts of Linux -- and even in public! The people that made Microsoft's products aren't supposed to publically criticize those products *even if there is a legitimate technical issue that should be brought up* because otherwise the marketers will get cranky and their boss will come down on them. Linux is trying out new ideas, about drinking beer, and about letting *everyone* into the game, no matter how poor. Linux is about doing neat things *because they're cool*. The fact that Linux saves money is just a neat side effect. It's really nice to use something that was made to be *fun*!
Linux doesn't have "issues addressed by critical security updates" all bundled up in tight little black boxes. When someone screws up in the Linux world, there is a BUG and it needs to be fixed, and people talk about exactly *why* it doesn't work. Often, whole sections of Linux get ripped out and replaced, because someone has some ideas that they want to try out, and when they implemented it, they discovered that indeed, their ideas really *did* work much better than the original code. Linux complies to lots of standards, but Linus and friends are also open about saying "this standard is stupid and broken, and this is why, and damned if we'll support it". With Microsoft, if they go to the effort of supporting a standard, it's a checkbox somewhere. It's used to sell Windows to a customer somewhere where someone involved in the purchasing process decided that that checkbox was a good idea.
In the Linux world, there are no gods. Everyone's feet are made of clay. Some people have acquired fame for what they've done, but there are no "official Linux developers" that are the only people that know how Linux works, or "Most Valued Professionals", or "Linux Developer Network Members". Everyone has to earn respect the hard way; not by marketing themselves impressively at a job interview to become a developer, but by contributing impressive work repeatedly. That's a fundamental degree of honesty that I just do not sense in the Windows world.
Say what you will about Windows as an operating system, but the application development toolchain is really, really slick.
I admit that I have less experience with Microsoft's tools than I do with with the Linux ones. However, I was fairly unimpressed with what I saw. Perhaps I'm missing something -- I'd love to be enlightened, as I see a number of MS people talking about how great the MS development environment is, but it seems to, well, kind of suck to me.
* The build configuration manager in Visual Studio is not very good. You create a new build (I think the defaults in a new project are "Debug" and "Release"), but if you want to maintain several configurations (Build, Release, non-GUI, etc), it gets to be a pain in the ass, and you have to copy options around from configuration to configuration. GNU make is much more flexible.
* A number of people seem to like the editor. I'll concede that it has a reasonably nice interface for completion, but I use xemacs as my editor, and Visual Studio really does not compare, now that I have xemacs set up *just* so. xemacs has similar completion (though without the argument descriptions and with an indexing pass) via etags.
* I've gotten errors/warnings during compilation from VS that I've found unclear before. I will concede that this may just a matter of the fact that I am very familiar with gcc and know its warnings well.
* VS apparently has a debugger that lets you modify code at the source level while debugging (that's one heck of a hack). Haven't played with it, but a few people have spoken of it positively, so I'll fly with it there.
* As GNU make runs, it prints out all the commands that it is executing. If a build step fails, you can see exactly what command was executing and what previous commands did. I've had times when Visual Studio said something like "Tool Command Failed", and I was reduced to commentin out lines in the pre- or post- build environment until the errors changed to determine what was going wrong.
* VS creates a ton of temporary and other files when you create projects. That's a little annoying.
* Pre-.NET version of VS use pseudo-text project files (.dsw). They *look* like text files, but VS cannot handle alternate line terminators on them. This is a pain when checking files into a CVS repository.
* I've had VS crash on me a during builds or other activity fair number of times. I haven't had gcc, GNU make, or xemacs crash on me in a long time.
* Free or bundled-with-VS diagnostic tools on Windows are relatively poor. I've cobbled together a set of tools that I generally use on Windows (filemon, regmon, Dependency Walker), but they don't really compare to the excellent free diagnostic software available for Linux.
* RAD tools -- I'm not a big fan of the Access or other RAD tool interfaces in Microsoft's development tools, but then I don't like glade and friends much either, so I can't really call out either.
I dunno. I'm just curious as to what I'm missing that people think is so fantastic.
TCO is not bogus. It is a real concept that has practical business meaning.
The problem is that it is *extremely* possible for malicious people to creatively define TCO -- there are an undefined set of inputs involved, and by choosing them appropriately and making favorable assumptions, you can almost always present your product as less expensive. For example, one vendor of snowshovels might have shovels that, when scraped against asphalt, release a chemical that tend to stunt slightly plant growth in the summer. They don't consider growth stunting to be an issue, so they don't include it in their TCO analysis when comparing their shovels to their competitor's shovels. A competitor might include it *and* include the most expensive estimate they can find from a landscaper to restore normal growth height (which might involve massaging each blade of grass and singing Native American love songs to it). They then might creatively disguise this value in an "misc. associated costs" value with a long list of small associated costs.
Yes, TCO is how non-free vendors attack Linux -- there isn't much else that they can fight with, when their competitor has a sticker price of $0. Try asking what TCO is on *any* set of competing products from *any* vendors -- you'll frequently get absolutely ridiculous numbers. If the TCO savings projected by consultants and vendors was remotely realistic, every Fortune 500 would have negative costs.
Just because TCO can be horribly abused, however, does not mean that it is not a valid business concept.
* MS SQL Server (cheaper than the golden Oracle standard)
* MS DOS (cheaper than CP/M and friends)
* Windows 9x+ (when in a Wintel configuration, traditionally significantly cheaper than an Apple Macintosh setup)
* Windows NT+. This competed heavily against *IX workstations, as it was cheap and easier to use for folks that knew Windows 9x but not *IX. It ate a lot of the CAD market and the 3d graphics market.
* Microsoft Mouse. While Microsoft's keyboards have traditionally been almost as ridiculously expensive as Apple's keyboards, they make fairly low-cost mice. The two-button kidney-bean design spread all over.
* MSIE, Outlook Express, and a few other Microsoft packages are free-as-in-beer.
It's true that their cash cow, Office, is not very attractively-priced today compared to other office suites, that they sell pricy developer tools (though certainly not the most expensive out there), and that Windows is more expensive than Linux, Microsoft has traditionally been a major budget leader -- it got where it did by underselling the existing players and advocating an open PC hardware platform (Microsoft, learn from this -- the more open and inexpensive something is, the more appealing it is!).
Today, Microsoft is *fat*. Like all large companies, when it makes an acquisition, it acquires people that are very skilled at burrowing into a company and making themselves inextricable. It has masses of managers. It maintains expensive research labs (which, despite the respected people working in them, produce disappointingly few interesting things that actually hit the real world -- compare to, say, Bell Labs). It has employees that have come to expect a certain standard of living. It simply has more overhead than it used to.
I can't imagine all the assets and copyrights of the FSF non-profit org being "turned over" to another party. Do you have any court cases as examples?
The FSF currently enjoys the position of probably controlling more intellectual property than any other organization on earth, partly due to a healthy roster of software to which the FSF holds copyright, but mostly because they control the GPL.
It is possible that one day in the future (RMS will die someday, as will the other people on the board) that a corporation could seize control of the FSF. It might be just that a sufficient number of people on the board become willing to sell out. There are currently six Directors of the FSF. I'm not sure what kind of majority is required to make a change. However, if a couple of corporations (say, ones with a lot of money that really didn't like the GPL), pulled together, say, $600 million dollars, perhaps they could pull a coup off. I mean, yes idealism and all that, but the FSF's board is a single point of failure, and if you've fallen upon hard times and are having trouble keeping a roof above your children's head, how far what would you do for $100 million? Would you sell a vote at a board meeting? Even if we suppose that Larry Lessig, Eben Moglen, and RMS are uncorruptable, what about their successors? What happens if a bomb goes off at a board meeting and kills the board en-masse (or, more mundanely, an plane containing members attending a FSF talk crashes)? Has the FSF made provision for such an occurrance?
The idea of modifying the GPL to allow specified "free software friendly" corporations to use GPL software without needing to release their own source in turn has come up before. It is, in fact, why Linus Torvalds releases his software as GPL v2 only (which, unfortunately, means that if a loophole is ever found in the GPL v2, there is no way to rescue his software).
Designing legal systems for the ages in a robust and resiliant manner is *hard*. How long do we expect the GPL to last for? 50 years? That's already one change of hands. 100 years? 300? The United States and its intellectual property system hasn't even been around for 300 years.
It all depends on whether short-term freedom of code or long-term freedom of code is important to you.
With the BSD license, closed source projects can use the code, which, in the short term, makes the BSD license more free.
With the GPL, closed source projects cannot use the code. With the BSD license, code tends to slowly drift into closed projects, as the old code becomes unnmaintained and unpatched. With the GPL, this is avoided -- once code is open source, it stays open source, and folks that fix bugs, and keep the code from being obsolete need to contribute their patches back to the open source codebase, which keeps it alive. This makes the GPL more free in the long term.
Neither is an invalid license, but they do different things.
The GPL is for people that are interested in promoting society-wide use of open-source.
The BSD license is for people that want to have a one-off license solution for a project that they've produced. I'd say that the BSD license competes with simply placing code in the public domain more than it does with the GPL.
Sometimes mods will mark something "redundant" when they feel that the point has been made a million other times and is perfectly well understood, even if the point hasn't been made on this particular story.
It's better than an "overrated" mod, isn't it?
I generally dislike the Redundant mod. While the idea behind it is nice -- minimize the signal-to-noise ratio by promoting non-redundant information -- it often winds up penalizing people that present ideas that were often presented earlier in a more clear or more informative manner.
The Overrated mod is just broken. Overrated and Underrated are immune to metamoderation. That breaks a significant part of Slashcode's checks and balances on moderation abuse.
The Flamebait moderation is generally reasonable, though I see a number of people using it on gray-area posts that they don't disagree with ("Linux isn't all that stable. For example...").
Offtopic should nver have been introduced. It really should have been replaced with "Irrelevant" a long time ago. The concept of "offtopic posts" originated, as far as I know, on USENET. On USENET, there are a number of newsgroups that are always having posts added to them, and are always active. If someone is posting about lizards on rec.herpetology.snakes, then someone will say that they are offtopic, and should be posting in rec.herpetology.lizards. That's reasonable and understandable -- there is another open forum on the topic of lizards always available. On Slashcode, however, people have a limited set of open forums that people are reading at any given time. If someone posts about the new G5s and mentions how they collect Mac Pluses, the thread *should* be able to shift over into discussion of Mac Pluses -- but often, moderators mod such discussion Offtopic. Irrelevant would be sufficient to eliminate out-of-the-blue posts like ("I just wanted to tell everyone that it's my birthday!"), but not blow away useful discussion that's an artifact of discussion. For example, this post is not on the topic of the story, but it is certainly not irrelevant -- it is a logical continuation of the way the conversation is going.
Re:How many licenses can fit on the head of a pin?
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PHP Not Moving To The GPL
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The problem is that ESR decided to go on a (particularly embarassing for the open source community, and not very diplomatically done) jihad to try to get Sun to open-source their Java implementation.
I think a lot more people are comfortable backing ESR than the rather-more-radical RMS.
So ESR's fans keep hammering on Sun.
In the case of Java, I think that it's even less of an issue than PHP, actually. Java was originally designed with the idea of many different VMs existing.
Actually, MR has been in the trenches quite a bit.
He was one of the first people to try challenging Microsoft for the desktop head-on.
He managed to grab $20M in funding from Microsoft.
He funded the "run Linux on the XBox awards" that partly funded the practical breaking of the XBox DRM, which probably cost Microsoft quite a pretty penny in lost royalties.
MR may not be a nice person. He may not even be someone that you want associated with Linux. You could argue that he hits below the belt when he fights. But one thing you can't say is that he wasn't fighting against Microsoft, because he did, more so than just about anyone out there -- he walked up, challenged Microsoft, and has been steadily beating them, abeit with a thousand little stabs. He's managed to cut himself a nice little niche out of Windows market share while staying about as high-profile at Redmond as could possibly be imagined. He's one of those rare beasts -- a competent exec.
He's hardly sold out -- he now has a slightly changed product name (that personally, I find more appealing), a good chunk of money, plenty of publicity from the case, and based on what he's done so far, I expect that he'll do fine for himself.
It's not the size I'm complaining about. There just plain aren't enough pixels being used in each quarter to see much, especially if perspective matters much (as in, you're moving quickly and need to see what's in front of you).
I remember playing Project Gotham on quarter-screens -- ugh. Halo's a lot nicer in full screen than quarter-screen as well.
Well...being able to intimately play it in the comfort of your very own bedroom with that someone special in your life! Heck, play it with your girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband - even your cat or dog if they're flexible enough.
3.) Online play is simply much easier and more popular on the PC and will always stay that way, despite what MS and EA would like you to believe. I think that it's also more fun, because console games generally attract more immature children.
I'm dubious. I think that if anything, online play will eventually be slightly easier on the console, because it's a closed environment.
I think that it's also more fun, because console games generally attract more immature children.
Actually, I think that most online games in general attract less mature people (relative to single player games). Most online multiplayer games are competitive instead of cooperative. Competitive play fits into the adolescent male psyche. It also requires a certain amount of dedication to become fairly good -- this is time that someone with a day job probably doesn't have.
That is the biggest hurdle for pc games. If they could come up with a standard where they say all new games must be playable on this minimum requirements without the minimum moving every 3 months then they might start doing better. They could quite easily control the industry to say the games must work on X until Y date when we upgrade the minimum standards)
Just play games that came out twelve months ago. Plus, you get all the bug fixes and good prices.
Computer game vendors just happen to release games "earlier" than console vendors. If you want the same experience, just slide a bit down the curve.
TV's also have this thing called a "couch" going for them. I love my couch, it's much better than my computer chair.
I'm currently lying on my bed and posting this from a desktop.
When I'm in my living room, I have a diskless X11 workstation set up that I use to talk to my bedroom computer. I sit on my couch and use it, eat chips, whatever.
Another person said "never underestimate the power of big".
I have a second computer in my living room up front, where everyone in the room can easily seem what is being done. When that display is too small to be seen, it's switched to a 1300 lumen projector that produces a far larger display than any of the TVs in the room. (There's really no need for two computers in the living room to pull this off -- it's just nice to have a scrap computer web terminal plus something for game-playing.)
I also prefer a game controller to the repetitive stress injuries from my mouse and keyboard.
I have two Logitech Gampad Pros hooked up to my computer (cheap digital pads, one USB and the other MIDI-port), a USB analog Logitech gamepad is somewhere behind my computer, and a fourth controller, a USB PS2 Dual Shock running through an adaptor, is also running through here.
Nothing in this setup is particularly expensive (well, the projector costs a few dollars, but people spend as much as a good projector costs on smaller gas-plasma TV, and don't seem to complain too bitterly).
* Was not constantly consuming screen space. * Didn't have elements of the menu move around when the user was trying to isolate the desired choice. * Scaled well to a larger number of entries.
Really, the only issue I can think of with it was that it wasn't hierarchical.
I can't figure out why you'd malign Window Shades (other than the fact that it was originally shareware?). It's a screen-space and CPU-cycle efficient and logical method of dealing with window management.
My computer monitor is higher-resolution than my TV.
My computer monitor is sharper than my TV.
My computer monitor has a higher refresh rather than my TV.
My computer monitor has more accurate color than my TV.
My computer monitor has fewer visual artifacts than my TV (shadowing, faint snow).
My computer monitor uses a better interface to talk to my computer (using a monitor cable running a VGA signal) than my TV (which uses NTSC).
My computer monitor can run at multiple resolutions, unlike my TV.
Really, the only things that TVs have going for them are that they're big.
Finally, it's not hard to get a sound card and video card that have TV out and audio out from the computer. As far as I can tell, this just loses the advantage of configurability that PC games allow.
"It was okay without a computer, so it still is!"
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1984 Comes To Boston
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· Score: 1
It does not bother me that a camera might be watching me do something illegal in public. A cop could watch me do something illegal in public. Why does it matter if it is a cop or a computer? If a cop, cop watching a TV screen, or a computer manages to catch a criminal before he does something bad, good.
The "it could be done before on a smaller scale, without computers, and laws were designed around this so you should accept it" argument is common and a fallacy.
Laws are designed with the limitations of what can be done in mind. For example, the ability for someone to know who I've called in the last hour, one time in my life, is not generally a privacy violation. It's largely useless data. However, in the presence of computers, it's possible to find out that 90% of the time after I call Al on weekdays, he calls Frank, and never otherwise calls Frank. If I am a political agitator under watch, police may now also place Frank under watch.
It used to be that reverse phone books were a bit dodgy to have. Now, in the presence of computers, a regular phone book simply is equivalent to a reverse phone book.
Do not underestimate the changes to the environment that massive data processing allows, and the different laws that are appropriate to such an environment.
I subscribe to the tenant, "Your application should look like the standard applications in your environment." If you are in windows, make your application menus like Microsoft Word as much as possible.
This sounds quite reasonable, and honestly, I probably would have tried something like this if I hadn't seen what it does.
It's actually quite a horrible idea.
The problem is that much of the time, very popular applications make interface mistakes that then get propagated.
For example, Microsoft regularly "beta tests" new interface elements for the next version of Windows in Office or MSIE. People consider that "since something is in Office, it's okay", they promptly duplicate it. This has led to duplication of a lot of interface mistakes on Windows. These include "smart menus" that reorder themselves, progress bars that move in non-minimum increments, animated icons to indicate ongoing tasks, rollover-highlighted toolbar buttons, wizards, multi-row tab bars, etc.
Also, many times behavior in one place is not appropriate in another. If you are using an interface guideline book instead of other software to help you choose what to do, at least the reasoning behind each decision can be included attached to the behavior to assist you in knowing when that behavior should *not* be used. For example, the classic MacOS flashes a menu item several times after it has been selected. This is not eye candy, but to help allow the user to determine which item has been selected, and to correct from errors in choosing the wrong item. If you simply saw this behavior, and were writing a game with custom widgets, you might think that *every* clickable item should flash several times after being clicked.
There should be a set of interface guidelines in place desktop-environment-wide that are sufficient to usually determine how to do something. This has worked well for Apple (who used to be King of User Interface), and is currently being used for GNOME and KDE.
I know I can get almost any task done with Gimp, but I also know that if I use Gimp I dont get my work done - simply because the interface is too difficult.
I'm lost. The closed source equivalent to the GIMP is Photoshop. Now, there is some degree of functionality that Photoshop has that the GIMP lacks, like the ability to handle for-press color representations, and some lighting effects. However, aside from those, I'm not sure what you're having trouble doing in the GIMP -- I generally find the two to be pretty much identical for work going to electronic output (though I admit, I use the GIMP more, so I sometimes have a bit of trouble finding the Photoshop equivalent feature, but it's pretty much always there).
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*That* is why I like Linux. Linux is fun. Well put.
:-)
It's not just the fun that you get when you have a witty and skilled tech writer, nor is it the fun of a video game.
Linux is just plain fun to use, to hack on, to code for, and to set up systems with.
It was made by a lot of people that were having a terrible amount of *fun* making something, and that kind of attitude just pervades everything. It doesn't have a musty pervasive sense of marketing, of lies about TCO and ROI, of a carefully-maintained-and-pristine image. The people that made Linux felt that it was okay to criticize parts of Linux -- and even in public! The people that made Microsoft's products aren't supposed to publically criticize those products *even if there is a legitimate technical issue that should be brought up* because otherwise the marketers will get cranky and their boss will come down on them. Linux is trying out new ideas, about drinking beer, and about letting *everyone* into the game, no matter how poor. Linux is about doing neat things *because they're cool*. The fact that Linux saves money is just a neat side effect. It's really nice to use something that was made to be *fun*!
Linux doesn't have "issues addressed by critical security updates" all bundled up in tight little black boxes. When someone screws up in the Linux world, there is a BUG and it needs to be fixed, and people talk about exactly *why* it doesn't work. Often, whole sections of Linux get ripped out and replaced, because someone has some ideas that they want to try out, and when they implemented it, they discovered that indeed, their ideas really *did* work much better than the original code. Linux complies to lots of standards, but Linus and friends are also open about saying "this standard is stupid and broken, and this is why, and damned if we'll support it". With Microsoft, if they go to the effort of supporting a standard, it's a checkbox somewhere. It's used to sell Windows to a customer somewhere where someone involved in the purchasing process decided that that checkbox was a good idea.
In the Linux world, there are no gods. Everyone's feet are made of clay. Some people have acquired fame for what they've done, but there are no "official Linux developers" that are the only people that know how Linux works, or "Most Valued Professionals", or "Linux Developer Network Members". Everyone has to earn respect the hard way; not by marketing themselves impressively at a job interview to become a developer, but by contributing impressive work repeatedly. That's a fundamental degree of honesty that I just do not sense in the Windows world.
I like Linux.
Say what you will about Windows as an operating system, but the application development toolchain is really, really slick.
I admit that I have less experience with Microsoft's tools than I do with with the Linux ones. However, I was fairly unimpressed with what I saw. Perhaps I'm missing something -- I'd love to be enlightened, as I see a number of MS people talking about how great the MS development environment is, but it seems to, well, kind of suck to me.
* The build configuration manager in Visual Studio is not very good. You create a new build (I think the defaults in a new project are "Debug" and "Release"), but if you want to maintain several configurations (Build, Release, non-GUI, etc), it gets to be a pain in the ass, and you have to copy options around from configuration to configuration. GNU make is much more flexible.
* A number of people seem to like the editor. I'll concede that it has a reasonably nice interface for completion, but I use xemacs as my editor, and Visual Studio really does not compare, now that I have xemacs set up *just* so. xemacs has similar completion (though without the argument descriptions and with an indexing pass) via etags.
* I've gotten errors/warnings during compilation from VS that I've found unclear before. I will concede that this may just a matter of the fact that I am very familiar with gcc and know its warnings well.
* VS apparently has a debugger that lets you modify code at the source level while debugging (that's one heck of a hack). Haven't played with it, but a few people have spoken of it positively, so I'll fly with it there.
* As GNU make runs, it prints out all the commands that it is executing. If a build step fails, you can see exactly what command was executing and what previous commands did. I've had times when Visual Studio said something like "Tool Command Failed", and I was reduced to commentin out lines in the pre- or post- build environment until the errors changed to determine what was going wrong.
* VS creates a ton of temporary and other files when you create projects. That's a little annoying.
* Pre-.NET version of VS use pseudo-text project files (.dsw). They *look* like text files, but VS cannot handle alternate line terminators on them. This is a pain when checking files into a CVS repository.
* I've had VS crash on me a during builds or other activity fair number of times. I haven't had gcc, GNU make, or xemacs crash on me in a long time.
* Free or bundled-with-VS diagnostic tools on Windows are relatively poor. I've cobbled together a set of tools that I generally use on Windows (filemon, regmon, Dependency Walker), but they don't really compare to the excellent free diagnostic software available for Linux.
* RAD tools -- I'm not a big fan of the Access or other RAD tool interfaces in Microsoft's development tools, but then I don't like glade and friends much either, so I can't really call out either.
I dunno. I'm just curious as to what I'm missing that people think is so fantastic.
How are you going to factor in estimated cost of being locked in to one vendor with Windows? It's difficult to get that into a number...
TCO is not bogus. It is a real concept that has practical business meaning.
The problem is that it is *extremely* possible for malicious people to creatively define TCO -- there are an undefined set of inputs involved, and by choosing them appropriately and making favorable assumptions, you can almost always present your product as less expensive. For example, one vendor of snowshovels might have shovels that, when scraped against asphalt, release a chemical that tend to stunt slightly plant growth in the summer. They don't consider growth stunting to be an issue, so they don't include it in their TCO analysis when comparing their shovels to their competitor's shovels. A competitor might include it *and* include the most expensive estimate they can find from a landscaper to restore normal growth height (which might involve massaging each blade of grass and singing Native American love songs to it). They then might creatively disguise this value in an "misc. associated costs" value with a long list of small associated costs.
Yes, TCO is how non-free vendors attack Linux -- there isn't much else that they can fight with, when their competitor has a sticker price of $0. Try asking what TCO is on *any* set of competing products from *any* vendors -- you'll frequently get absolutely ridiculous numbers. If the TCO savings projected by consultants and vendors was remotely realistic, every Fortune 500 would have negative costs.
Just because TCO can be horribly abused, however, does not mean that it is not a valid business concept.
PC's only just recently matched the price point of those 1985 era machines.
Keep inflation in mind. According to this inflation calculator, a $400 product in 1985 would cost $675.66 in 2003.
Was Microsoft *ever* the low price solution?
Microsoft has produced:
* MS SQL Server (cheaper than the golden Oracle standard)
* MS DOS (cheaper than CP/M and friends)
* Windows 9x+ (when in a Wintel configuration, traditionally significantly cheaper than an Apple Macintosh setup)
* Windows NT+. This competed heavily against *IX workstations, as it was cheap and easier to use for folks that knew Windows 9x but not *IX. It ate a lot of the CAD market and the 3d graphics market.
* Microsoft Mouse. While Microsoft's keyboards have traditionally been almost as ridiculously expensive as Apple's keyboards, they make fairly low-cost mice. The two-button kidney-bean design spread all over.
* MSIE, Outlook Express, and a few other Microsoft packages are free-as-in-beer.
It's true that their cash cow, Office, is not very attractively-priced today compared to other office suites, that they sell pricy developer tools (though certainly not the most expensive out there), and that Windows is more expensive than Linux, Microsoft has traditionally been a major budget leader -- it got where it did by underselling the existing players and advocating an open PC hardware platform (Microsoft, learn from this -- the more open and inexpensive something is, the more appealing it is!).
Today, Microsoft is *fat*. Like all large companies, when it makes an acquisition, it acquires people that are very skilled at burrowing into a company and making themselves inextricable. It has masses of managers. It maintains expensive research labs (which, despite the respected people working in them, produce disappointingly few interesting things that actually hit the real world -- compare to, say, Bell Labs). It has employees that have come to expect a certain standard of living. It simply has more overhead than it used to.
I can't imagine all the assets and copyrights of the FSF non-profit org being "turned over" to another party. Do you have any court cases as examples?
The FSF currently enjoys the position of probably controlling more intellectual property than any other organization on earth, partly due to a healthy roster of software to which the FSF holds copyright, but mostly because they control the GPL.
It is possible that one day in the future (RMS will die someday, as will the other people on the board) that a corporation could seize control of the FSF. It might be just that a sufficient number of people on the board become willing to sell out. There are currently six Directors of the FSF. I'm not sure what kind of majority is required to make a change. However, if a couple of corporations (say, ones with a lot of money that really didn't like the GPL), pulled together, say, $600 million dollars, perhaps they could pull a coup off. I mean, yes idealism and all that, but the FSF's board is a single point of failure, and if you've fallen upon hard times and are having trouble keeping a roof above your children's head, how far what would you do for $100 million? Would you sell a vote at a board meeting? Even if we suppose that Larry Lessig, Eben Moglen, and RMS are uncorruptable, what about their successors? What happens if a bomb goes off at a board meeting and kills the board en-masse (or, more mundanely, an plane containing members attending a FSF talk crashes)? Has the FSF made provision for such an occurrance?
The idea of modifying the GPL to allow specified "free software friendly" corporations to use GPL software without needing to release their own source in turn has come up before. It is, in fact, why Linus Torvalds releases his software as GPL v2 only (which, unfortunately, means that if a loophole is ever found in the GPL v2, there is no way to rescue his software).
Designing legal systems for the ages in a robust and resiliant manner is *hard*. How long do we expect the GPL to last for? 50 years? That's already one change of hands. 100 years? 300? The United States and its intellectual property system hasn't even been around for 300 years.
It all depends on whether short-term freedom of code or long-term freedom of code is important to you.
With the BSD license, closed source projects can use the code, which, in the short term, makes the BSD license more free.
With the GPL, closed source projects cannot use the code. With the BSD license, code tends to slowly drift into closed projects, as the old code becomes unnmaintained and unpatched. With the GPL, this is avoided -- once code is open source, it stays open source, and folks that fix bugs, and keep the code from being obsolete need to contribute their patches back to the open source codebase, which keeps it alive. This makes the GPL more free in the long term.
Neither is an invalid license, but they do different things.
The GPL is for people that are interested in promoting society-wide use of open-source.
The BSD license is for people that want to have a one-off license solution for a project that they've produced. I'd say that the BSD license competes with simply placing code in the public domain more than it does with the GPL.
Sometimes mods will mark something "redundant" when they feel that the point has been made a million other times and is perfectly well understood, even if the point hasn't been made on this particular story.
It's better than an "overrated" mod, isn't it?
I generally dislike the Redundant mod. While the idea behind it is nice -- minimize the signal-to-noise ratio by promoting non-redundant information -- it often winds up penalizing people that present ideas that were often presented earlier in a more clear or more informative manner.
The Overrated mod is just broken. Overrated and Underrated are immune to metamoderation. That breaks a significant part of Slashcode's checks and balances on moderation abuse.
The Flamebait moderation is generally reasonable, though I see a number of people using it on gray-area posts that they don't disagree with ("Linux isn't all that stable. For example...").
Offtopic should nver have been introduced. It really should have been replaced with "Irrelevant" a long time ago. The concept of "offtopic posts" originated, as far as I know, on USENET. On USENET, there are a number of newsgroups that are always having posts added to them, and are always active. If someone is posting about lizards on rec.herpetology.snakes, then someone will say that they are offtopic, and should be posting in rec.herpetology.lizards. That's reasonable and understandable -- there is another open forum on the topic of lizards always available. On Slashcode, however, people have a limited set of open forums that people are reading at any given time. If someone posts about the new G5s and mentions how they collect Mac Pluses, the thread *should* be able to shift over into discussion of Mac Pluses -- but often, moderators mod such discussion Offtopic. Irrelevant would be sufficient to eliminate out-of-the-blue posts like ("I just wanted to tell everyone that it's my birthday!"), but not blow away useful discussion that's an artifact of discussion. For example, this post is not on the topic of the story, but it is certainly not irrelevant -- it is a logical continuation of the way the conversation is going.
The problem is that ESR decided to go on a (particularly embarassing for the open source community, and not very diplomatically done) jihad to try to get Sun to open-source their Java implementation.
I think a lot more people are comfortable backing ESR than the rather-more-radical RMS.
So ESR's fans keep hammering on Sun.
In the case of Java, I think that it's even less of an issue than PHP, actually. Java was originally designed with the idea of many different VMs existing.
The point is that there are equivalent features.
A menu item in Photoshop generally has a menu item in GIMP as an equivalent.
My point is that you don't have to reproduce features using more basic features; that the ease of use is the same.
Actually, MR has been in the trenches quite a bit.
He was one of the first people to try challenging Microsoft for the desktop head-on.
He managed to grab $20M in funding from Microsoft.
He funded the "run Linux on the XBox awards" that partly funded the practical breaking of the XBox DRM, which probably cost Microsoft quite a pretty penny in lost royalties.
MR may not be a nice person. He may not even be someone that you want associated with Linux. You could argue that he hits below the belt when he fights. But one thing you can't say is that he wasn't fighting against Microsoft, because he did, more so than just about anyone out there -- he walked up, challenged Microsoft, and has been steadily beating them, abeit with a thousand little stabs. He's managed to cut himself a nice little niche out of Windows market share while staying about as high-profile at Redmond as could possibly be imagined. He's one of those rare beasts -- a competent exec.
He's hardly sold out -- he now has a slightly changed product name (that personally, I find more appealing), a good chunk of money, plenty of publicity from the case, and based on what he's done so far, I expect that he'll do fine for himself.
It's not the size I'm complaining about. There just plain aren't enough pixels being used in each quarter to see much, especially if perspective matters much (as in, you're moving quickly and need to see what's in front of you).
I remember playing Project Gotham on quarter-screens -- ugh. Halo's a lot nicer in full screen than quarter-screen as well.
What points in my criticism are unique to me?
Quarter-screen displays suck, though. A lot.
I just read the blurb on that product.
... :-)
Well...being able to intimately play it in the comfort of your very own bedroom with that someone special in your life! Heck, play it with your girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband - even your cat or dog if they're flexible enough.
Hmm
3.) Online play is simply much easier and more popular on the PC and will always stay that way, despite what MS and EA would like you to believe. I think that it's also more fun, because console games generally attract more immature children.
I'm dubious. I think that if anything, online play will eventually be slightly easier on the console, because it's a closed environment.
I think that it's also more fun, because console games generally attract more immature children.
Actually, I think that most online games in general attract less mature people (relative to single player games). Most online multiplayer games are competitive instead of cooperative. Competitive play fits into the adolescent male psyche. It also requires a certain amount of dedication to become fairly good -- this is time that someone with a day job probably doesn't have.
That is the biggest hurdle for pc games. If they could come up with a standard where they say all new games must be playable on this minimum requirements without the minimum moving every 3 months then they might start doing better. They could quite easily control the industry to say the games must work on X until Y date when we upgrade the minimum standards)
Just play games that came out twelve months ago. Plus, you get all the bug fixes and good prices.
Computer game vendors just happen to release games "earlier" than console vendors. If you want the same experience, just slide a bit down the curve.
TV's also have this thing called a "couch" going for them. I love my couch, it's much better than my computer chair.
I'm currently lying on my bed and posting this from a desktop.
When I'm in my living room, I have a diskless X11 workstation set up that I use to talk to my bedroom computer. I sit on my couch and use it, eat chips, whatever.
Another person said "never underestimate the power of big".
I have a second computer in my living room up front, where everyone in the room can easily seem what is being done. When that display is too small to be seen, it's switched to a 1300 lumen projector that produces a far larger display than any of the TVs in the room. (There's really no need for two computers in the living room to pull this off -- it's just nice to have a scrap computer web terminal plus something for game-playing.)
I also prefer a game controller to the repetitive stress injuries from my mouse and keyboard.
I have two Logitech Gampad Pros hooked up to my computer (cheap digital pads, one USB and the other MIDI-port), a USB analog Logitech gamepad is somewhere behind my computer, and a fourth controller, a USB PS2 Dual Shock running through an adaptor, is also running through here.
Nothing in this setup is particularly expensive (well, the projector costs a few dollars, but people spend as much as a good projector costs on smaller gas-plasma TV, and don't seem to complain too bitterly).
Applications Menu was:
* Was not constantly consuming screen space.
* Didn't have elements of the menu move around when the user was trying to isolate the desired choice.
* Scaled well to a larger number of entries.
Really, the only issue I can think of with it was that it wasn't hierarchical.
I can't figure out why you'd malign Window Shades (other than the fact that it was originally shareware?). It's a screen-space and CPU-cycle efficient and logical method of dealing with window management.
What don't you like about them?
Oh, lovely. I can play games on a TV.
Let's see:
My computer monitor is higher-resolution than my TV.
My computer monitor is sharper than my TV.
My computer monitor has a higher refresh rather than my TV.
My computer monitor has more accurate color than my TV.
My computer monitor has fewer visual artifacts than my TV (shadowing, faint snow).
My computer monitor uses a better interface to talk to my computer (using a monitor cable running a VGA signal) than my TV (which uses NTSC).
My computer monitor can run at multiple resolutions, unlike my TV.
Really, the only things that TVs have going for them are that they're big.
Finally, it's not hard to get a sound card and video card that have TV out and audio out from the computer. As far as I can tell, this just loses the advantage of configurability that PC games allow.
It does not bother me that a camera might be watching me do something illegal in public. A cop could watch me do something illegal in public. Why does it matter if it is a cop or a computer? If a cop, cop watching a TV screen, or a computer manages to catch a criminal before he does something bad, good.
The "it could be done before on a smaller scale, without computers, and laws were designed around this so you should accept it" argument is common and a fallacy.
Laws are designed with the limitations of what can be done in mind. For example, the ability for someone to know who I've called in the last hour, one time in my life, is not generally a privacy violation. It's largely useless data. However, in the presence of computers, it's possible to find out that 90% of the time after I call Al on weekdays, he calls Frank, and never otherwise calls Frank. If I am a political agitator under watch, police may now also place Frank under watch.
It used to be that reverse phone books were a bit dodgy to have. Now, in the presence of computers, a regular phone book simply is equivalent to a reverse phone book.
Do not underestimate the changes to the environment that massive data processing allows, and the different laws that are appropriate to such an environment.
As the quote goes:
"The only intuitive interface is the nipple, after that, it's all learned."
Personally, I prefer a trackball to a laptop-style nipple when it comes to intuitiveness.
I subscribe to the tenant, "Your application should look like the standard applications in your environment." If you are in windows, make your application menus like Microsoft Word as much as possible.
This sounds quite reasonable, and honestly, I probably would have tried something like this if I hadn't seen what it does.
It's actually quite a horrible idea.
The problem is that much of the time, very popular applications make interface mistakes that then get propagated.
For example, Microsoft regularly "beta tests" new interface elements for the next version of Windows in Office or MSIE. People consider that "since something is in Office, it's okay", they promptly duplicate it. This has led to duplication of a lot of interface mistakes on Windows. These include "smart menus" that reorder themselves, progress bars that move in non-minimum increments, animated icons to indicate ongoing tasks, rollover-highlighted toolbar buttons, wizards, multi-row tab bars, etc.
Also, many times behavior in one place is not appropriate in another. If you are using an interface guideline book instead of other software to help you choose what to do, at least the reasoning behind each decision can be included attached to the behavior to assist you in knowing when that behavior should *not* be used. For example, the classic MacOS flashes a menu item several times after it has been selected. This is not eye candy, but to help allow the user to determine which item has been selected, and to correct from errors in choosing the wrong item. If you simply saw this behavior, and were writing a game with custom widgets, you might think that *every* clickable item should flash several times after being clicked.
There should be a set of interface guidelines in place desktop-environment-wide that are sufficient to usually determine how to do something. This has worked well for Apple (who used to be King of User Interface), and is currently being used for GNOME and KDE.
I know I can get almost any task done with Gimp, but I also know that if I use Gimp I dont get my work done - simply because the interface is too difficult.
I'm lost. The closed source equivalent to the GIMP is Photoshop. Now, there is some degree of functionality that Photoshop has that the GIMP lacks, like the ability to handle for-press color representations, and some lighting effects. However, aside from those, I'm not sure what you're having trouble doing in the GIMP -- I generally find the two to be pretty much identical for work going to electronic output (though I admit, I use the GIMP more, so I sometimes have a bit of trouble finding the Photoshop equivalent feature, but it's pretty much always there).