And when the fat, stodgy and arrogant Microsoft works with the fat, stodgy and arrogant AOL and gets all the fat, stodgy and arrogant ISPs and network backbones to run only fat, stodgy and arrogant AOMS software, and passes legislation making it criminal to attempt to deconstruct such work causing a natural, easy takeover of everybody's communications infrastructure, where are you going to escape _to_? Jon Postel is dead. I'm not sure whether I'm happy he doesn't have to see this, or sad that he isn't around to fight it. You simply don't know your danger. What you are moving towards is feudalism, top-down government without representation or recourse, and you only like it because computer geeks get to be the feudal barons. If somebody suggested that your state Senator (assuming you're in the USA- I think you must surely be, Europe loves feudalism less as they actually live with it here and there) ought to become your King and take all authority from the federal government, you'd flip out! How dare he! I think the way the US government works, particularly in this case, is deeply flawed but probably the best we can expect.
"Although still unconfirmed after many months, word has it that Microsoft and AOL may have quietly agreed to parley AOL's recent purchase of Netscape into a "Look at all this dangerous competition" argument for Microsoft -- but that once the trial is over, AOL will continue to push MS products to its users the same as it did before the buyout for the forseeable future as part of an ongoing MS-AOL alliance which is being kept as quiet as possible during the court proceedings." -macosrumors
This would be reasonably in character for both companies. How does the notion of one trust literally controlling everything grab you? How willing are you to contemplate the possibility of this fairly plausible (albeit hideously orwellian) scenario accurately describing what's going on now- and still calling the _government_ Orwellian? I'm sorry- at least I can vote for the government, such as it is. If your view prevails, the obvious end result is that trusts will completely devour everything while you twiddle your fingers or other parts of your anatomy, fervently protecting their rights to own you. No way: that's totally unacceptable, and your ignorance is not an excuse, and while value neutrality is fine and good there is always a limit. In the event that AOL and Microsoft _are_ finding it better to divide up ownership of the world by using this convenient opportunity to pretend to be battling while simultaneously buying up everybody else out there, only to turn around when the dust settles and go 'tadah! There Can Be Only One'- what, exactly, do you propose to do about it? Your attitude is totally unhelpful _before_ the disaster. Do you have any better plans for _after_ this seizure of power (it's lovely how the appearance of _two_ huge powers seems to make it OK for those powers to be eating up everything else- lovely until they turn out to be cooperating in this...), or are you simply going to retreat to a fscking armed compound with no electricity or phone service?:P 'scuse the ferocity, but I hadn't considered how effective MS/AOL collaboration would be for both companies- they're somewhat orthogonal and could help each other, and pretending to fight _now_ is one hell of a smokescreen- and the instant I get tipped off by MOSR to consider the idea, I come here and suddenly there's no such thing as trusts- feh!
You obviously don't know the Classics. We are specifically talking a Mac Classic, normal HD, running system 6 without any extensions. It boots in fourteen seconds from flipping the switch to being able to select or launch something in the Finder. You totally don't know Classics very well. They may not be good for much, but every one I've seen boots insanely fast. I think a lot of stuff was simply stuck in ROM, though I haven't inspected the Classic ROM anytime lately. Actually, it boots in _thirteen_ seconds from switch to Finder, but I called it fourteen because thirteen was unlucky (you see? it _was_ unlucky! takes it a whole extra second now!) My 9500 which is the _serious_ machine (and dualboots linuxppc, of course) takes much much longer to boot, over 30 seconds. So did my old performa 575. Classics are very special in some ways, and they boot up so fast it'd make your head spin- I think if you start giving them system 7 etc. then it slows down, but I'm sorry, I've timed it and you are flat wrong. It _is_ damn near an order of magnitude faster to boot than your G3. What's so wrong about that?
This is particularly interesting when you think about that "In other words, software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry." What you're talking about can be taken two ways: one, it could mean 'buying three upgrades from Netscape' and then you keep with the last one, or to a Microsoft it'd mean 'buying IE for three months, then it self-destructs or MS takes it away from you again unless you pay'. See the difference? In the first case this gets deeply into the new perspective on code- that gee, it never _does_ seem to be totally finished, so what you're paying for is the active work of a bunch of programmers. The resulting object is no more tangible than the tape-recorded voices of hired mediators in a nasty dispute- this is not about the _result_, it's about hiring people who can execute the process and come up with the answer to that situation, and each situation will be different. Programmers are like talking-professionals, expressing themselves in programming languages to solve that day's problems. The result (as ESR has resoundingly figured out) is valueless very quickly, but can be intensely valuable right at the moment. You're not buying an heirloom item, you're buying the expertise by which a programmer can perfectly adapt code to the needs of the moment to solve problems for you. In that second case, where MS takes software away from you, this reveals a continuing total failure to understand where the value actually lies. This concept actually comes from MS, which wishes to rent its software so you can't own it and can't keep it. It overlooks the fact that last year's software does not retain its value acceptably- it's like a bullying tactic, needless. Most people will not _want_ the known-buggy, out of date last year's software anyhow- and those with a reason to stay with a version that works for them will be arbitrarily punished. It's a lose-lose situation because if someone was going to upgrade, they'd upgrade anyhow- and if someone won't, punishing them for it will not appreciably change their decision. The really ironic thing is this: Microsoft's rampant selling of windows alphas might be the smartest healthiest thing they could do compared to these other ideas. That's charging people to keep pace with the continuing work of programmers. The difference with this and open source is that in the MS case, you have no access to the programmers, where in open source, what you'd do is go to them, throw money and say 'code me THIS!' and have them develop exactly what you want. Then you are the first to have it, and though it becomes part of the global source library, presumably you asked for the new thing for a _reason_, a practical reason like having a special web hosting service that needs to do THIS really well, for which you already have buyers and mindshare. If you can execute on the potential of an open source software tool better than your competition, then you win that competition- it's as easy as that, and has nothing to do with hoarding special bits of code. A little example is co-opnet.org, a cooperative website compiled from a set of work files, like a non-JIT perl site or something. I'm actually on the board of directors of the nonprofit corporation co-opnet.org has evolved into- and I'm also the author of the GPLed sitebuilding software that the site is made from. Anybody could take this software (it's Mac-based but hey- you have source!) and try to get business with it but _we_ know nonprofits, _we_ know the ropes, _we_ can execute better than Joe Schmoe who comes around and thinks he can take our clients. We're only barely begun (gonna get a real ISP hosting setup together, for starters, currently it's a virtual hosting service that's not going to survive slashdotting in the slightest) but what we're doing, EVEN THOUGH it hinges on the use of special software to make a website that's maintained in a certain way, does not require that said software be proprietary. This is what I see companies like Microsoft as missing- it's not about the _software_ at all, it's about the tasks being done with that software. With Quicken, are you buying dialog boxes and GUI and a database? No- you're buying a promise that your money will be managed responsibly for you (a promise that isn't being kept, to hear some reports from that area). With Office, are you buying fancy text objects and spreadsheets, the code of that? No, you're buying the promise that you will be helped to communicate more persuasively, to keep your accounts in a more enlightening manner, to calculate and extrapolate things you wouldn't be able to figure out otherwise. In this light the _wizards_ and example files and stationery files are by far the most important part of the product (and they are mostly data!) and the actual code fades into meaninglessness. How much hatred for Microsoft would be justified if they chilled out, stopped trying to kill other technology, and focussed on being _the_ place for lusers and pointy-haired bosses to go and be walked through the creation of good business letters, home finance spreadsheets, business plans, you name it? That's their gift- they do have the patience for that, and few Linux people could remotely rival them in that area. Yet, it's so very centered on _process_ and not the mockery of property that applications currently are... (okay, so you can have _one_ copy of this string of bits, but it has to stay on this machine, and after a while is it okay if we pretend that it doesn't work and ask you to never use that string of bits again? Oh, and though you bought the box the string of bits came in, don't even think about looking at them or we'll put you in prison...) Process is the direction to look in, for the turn of the century. No matter how many nifty tools are devised, people simply will not know what to do with them unless they are told- or better still, coached through it in an interactive, personal sense. Much of this coaching, being language and imagery, can easily fall under copyright simply because it is not computer code, but human expression, and it could be considered separate from the actual computer code which could be open source- but, then, even this is thinking too small- really, what the future holds is this:
Microsoft Good morning! Welcome to Your Database. What do you want to do? Customer Uh, hi! I want to make a database for my house. Is that OK? I mean, can you do that for me? Microsoft Sure can! Okay, do you have the mozilla whiteboard open? We're going to start billing now if that's alright with you- click 'Whoa!' to pause if it starts costing you too much. Okay, most people mean 'a database for their personal finances *shows example* which includes house amortization *show* and gives you a sense of what your overall finances need to be like. This can help you manage your finances responsibly. Is there anything extra you need to include? Customer Er, yeah- you see, my wife is a lawyer but she works out of the home, so we need to keep more accounts because of the tax people, you know? That's why I came here. I don't understand any of that stuff, but what will I need? Microsoft Okay! *zwip of information lookup* You're talking about having a separate category in postgreSQL to keep your wife's expenses, and it has to *zwip* be one that stands up to an audit, so we'll be *zwip* needing to configure it with some redundancy to be legally accountable under US Code #1326758723... Customer *panicking* what's _that_? Microsoft *zwip of information lookup, wave of patience from Microsoft rep who is happy to be patient as the customer is being billed by the minute...*
Face it: if Microsoft did that for a living, it would _rule_. They are admirably suited to doing it, and it wouldn't have to step on anybody's toes. THAT is process, and with a little effort they'd be better at it than anyone- and could clear the field and leave computer software to be developed by and for the users and hackers- they'd be doing what they do best, handholding, and would not have to deal with what they do worst, actual performance and lasting value. There is money to be made from _use_ of software as a service, and let's leave the coding to people who specialize in it, rather than trying to slant it heavily so that laymen supposedly can do sysadmin type things. Let Linux diversify in a thousand ways and become ubitiquous- and let Microsoft be the helpdesk to the world, not the IT chief. The sooner they figure this out the better off they shall be- every dollar they spend on trying to retain hold of protocols and standards is a dollar WASTED, a dollar that they are not spending in trying to be the paid consultant to a world full of kids researching term papers and Moms trying to keep family accounts for tax purposes and Dads trying to put together a really great trout fishing boat.
Huh? Such as? From ESR I see ideas like "In other words, software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.". This is startlingly apt- and explains otherwise inexplicable things about the Linux movement, not to mention where the profitability really is in the broader PC industry! Your counterexample is? You're not specifying. Personally, in contrast to the fellow who said 'I support RMS's ideas because I believe in utopia', I support RMS's ideas because I do _not_ believe in utopia... somebody mentioned how RMS is the way he is because he pretty well got chased out of the MIT AI lab by proprietary software. No hackers anymore to talk with- just users and competing proprietary LISP machines- now fast forward a few years- where are they now? Nowhere. This killed off a healthy software ecology and died off in meaningless conflicts leaving _nothing_ in its place, wasting a huge amount of time and effort. My personal take on that history is that it is rather disgusting. Hard to see how the people could have acted differently at the time- but still disgusting. In theory, capitalistic jealously guarded intellectual property might result in progress. In the real world it appears to be all too susceptible to stagnation and corruption- software rot, feature creep, attempts to prolong the useful life of some code long after it is dead. In contrast to the usual use of Microsoft as a culprit, I'll say that Netscape (the traditional, not Mozilla) is a great example of closed software rot and failure to develop acceptably. By contrast, you have something like Apache- when matched in benchmarks it loses to IIS, but in actual normal use (its true purpose) it's been proven resilient, effective and in many cases (such as heavy latency or really varied load atypical to controlled intranet-like tests) it's greatly superior to IIS in practice. If it was a classic commercial product- there would be no alternative but to slant things the same way as IIS does, and get them to perform equally well on benches and equally unreliably in the real world (there are always tradeoffs). Since it is open source and maintained by those who actually run it, the likelihood is that it will continue to be optimized for real use EVEN IF that means it continues to do poorly at strange and artificial benchmarks. ESR talks almost as big as Alvin Toffler, but he happens to be trying to understand that real world which you (the above AC) do not seem to comprehend. Pragmatism rules most things. If open source leads to healthier software then it will continue to thrive, whether you can accept its politics and morals or whether you think them hopelessly naive. It's still early yet- wait and see, but don't wait too long. The open source train is at the station, and there comes a time when you have to make up your mind to get on, or you'll just have a hell of a lot of running to do to catch up later;)
Absolutely. It was shocking to see that remark to the effect that 'bad advocacy killed OS/2': you'd think Slashdot would be better informed about the Microsoft antitrust case. Anybody with a strong interest in seeing Microsoft continue to expand and destroy until there aren't any other choices at all, would of course be strongly in favor of blaming bad advocacy. It sounds sort of plausible, it allows a useful fiction that individual consumers control the industry and can make or break distribution channels merely by their whims, and it's a useful smokescreen to cover up the fact that a software trust has been putting the screws to everybody it can, for at least ten years. If you truly believe that bad advocacy killed OS/2, then it's a very easy step to conclude that the thing to do is practice only _good_ advocacy, and trust that niceness and reasonable dialogue will persuade manufacturers who are being presented with ultimatums of "enough with this Linux now that the trial's over, otherwise we will multiply your license fees by 10 times and lower your worst competitor's by 10 percent just to break you". If you really believe that good advocacy and civil polite discourse will persuade key distribution channels to permit the existence of Linux when faced with penalties of that scale, then please ask Tinkerbell to sprinkle some fairy dust on the linux kernel to make it faster, as you might as well believe in her too. We'll be lucky if they don't have open-source-derived software declared an obscenity to be blocked from network transmission, if we seriously go around acting like good advocacy will be enough. We are at war. Of course Mindcraft lied. They're at war too- just on the other side. If they _did_ allow us to pay them to slant the other way, they'd never see work from MS or any commercial vendor again. They have to pick their side and stay with it, and they will- it's too late to stop now. Foul language and brutal accusations of treachery are not _unwarranted_, they are just totally _unhelpful_. Often such outbursts aren't worth the temporary feelings of relief and self-righteousness they bring. Get used to the idea of not doing this: it's not because such attacks are _unfair_, no! The point is, this is too serious for mucking around like that! It's no joke. _Legislation_ is being railroaded through every which way to support the Microsoft trust in particular, and to render proprietary software free of any responsibility in general. If the government antitrust case doesn't end in radical adjustments, then what? I'll tell you what: cursing and reviling people is going to seem damned inadequate at that point. It won't help anymore, when your ISP goes under/is bought out/develops its IT committment to standardize fully on MS/IP or whatever might be waiting out there- it is not unthinkable that the world's communication infrastructure could end up collectively owned by various trusts with no tolerance anymore for anything but the technological mainstream. Linux will not be _outlawed_, necessarily- but you'll have to call up BBSes again, because the Net will be off limits- and reverse engineering the protocols will mean jail time, and getting caught communicating will prove guilt. There are situations where you would be _assigned_ a computer just in order to pay taxes and be a citizen- given enough economizing and reduction of cost and given continued emphasis on standardisation, the 'citizen's PC' is not unthinkable. You'd better believe tampering with it would be against the law. Welcome to '2004'. This screed has been in the true spirit of Orwell's '1984': a desperate attempt to paint things _so_ black that reality could not rival it. If you think it's incomprehensibly outrageous, consider this: if I'd made it less vitriolic, reality would have already outstripped it. We're living amid the first virtual war, and few people can comprehend it as yet: by the time the regular person finds that their existence is centrally monitored and entirely regulated through a private company in Redmond, by the time that company, having nothing left to conquer, moves in on government itself (who saw the report on the Microsoft 'game' in New York, of hunting terrorists? WHY are Microsofties _training_ as _cops_? All in good fun, never mind all that equipment...) then it will be too late for anything but _physical_ war. And that should not have to happen... Me, I don't write to people like Mindcraft. I wouldn't know what to say to them. They don't know their danger. People don't understand the nature of power- the instant it regroups and begins building under a new guise, it's the fable of the Blind Men and the Elephant again- it's a treetrunk! it's a snake! it's a wall! It is power. Raw power on a scale beyond all third-world countries and beginning to be beyond some of the big-leaguers. And because they're not training troops (and _why_ were Microsoft managers 'hunting terrorists' with thousands of dollars' worth of technical support in New York City? Are they really satisfied with being a shoddy merchant anymore? WHY are they rehearsing such cop-games, what's putting it in their heads to recreate in such a manner?), people want to behave like they're the same entity that was running around in Bellevue, Washington, coding 'Typing Tutor'. People who flip out at stuff like the Mindcraft reports are only reacting instinctively to something they don't properly understand- a quiet but pervasive shifting of power all over the world. Information is power. Control of information is serious power. It's rather childish to behave like old men sitting around in judge's robes and senators' suits are still the top of the totem pole, still the authority figure. They are not what they used to be- they don't move fast enough- sooner or later, they've got to go. This doesn't have to be the future, but placing a trusting childlike faith in the power of the individual and the charm of civilized advocacy is not a helpful move. We're at war: maybe a new kind of war, but a war. We already know many of the terms- Microsoft, for one, has leaked some of their plans (such as the subversion of common standards, something which would have been noticed anyway). I'm only saying that it would be out of character for them to stop there, or to think small. Anybody wishing to believe that Microsoft (or anyone in their singular position) shows respect for limits, or thinks small and humble, may go on doing so all they wish, but are implored to not weary wiser people with their inexplicable beliefs.
This is what really ticks me off: that people can decide to target the whole essential concept that I and other techs I know are _desperate_ for. I'm sorry- open source is not negotiable, that's why I release occasional code under GPL and not, say, a BSD license or public domain. We are _constantly_ harassed by manifestations of proprietary software, of closedness. _This_ CD-Rom simply thrown away because you can't get it to connect to anything but a Sony MB, _that_ monitor gathering dust because it requires a funky cable to even work, _this_ new compression software upgrade featuring a wonderful new format that causes the previous version to download the whole file and silently delete it on failure to expand it, _that_ web browser rewriting global image file mappings every time it runs. I could go on and on, and I could start to make stuff up, and I'll bet you proprietary software will equal or surpass the most horrible things I can even imagine. After all, it's becoming legal for them to bear no responsibility for anything, and it might even become illegal for you to even _try_ to find out what this stuff is surreptitiously doing- so _what_ is stopping closedware from becoming even more insanely manipulative, destructive and inadequate? Not 'quality': guess what? When people don't have a choice, it's more profitable to turn the screws on them. A free market only exists when people can _legitimately_ jump to something else, when nothing can hold them hostage. The very nature of data makes it a damned good hostage, and all the better when it's proprietary and you're not allowed to deconstruct your _own_ data, only to edit and view it- and the next logical step after reverse engineering is made illegal is to make the reverse engineering of data formats illegal. Well, there's an element of truth in a lot of the whining against Linux. It is still awkward, maybe even more awkward than Windows is, there is little chance of making a lot of profit in it, and its mama dresses it funny;) However, what a lot of people are overlooking is this: WE OWN IT! We _OWN_ it. I don't care if it seems clunky, or if it doesn't seem like a classic money-spinner business opportunity. Some of us consider computers and the worldwide networking and connectivity now available to people as _important_ things: things of tangible value in and of themselves regardless of whether the interface is slick or clunky or takes a few days or weeks to master. The problem is this: the power is being centralized in very much the wrong hands- in some ways proprietary software, particularly Microsoft, is similar to the Soviet Union at its most repressive, because the power is all centralized with people you can't vote out or protest to. You're a total peon, a helpless peasant who has to endure whatever the ruling power feels like decreeing, because you have no say in what goes on, and in a very large number of cases you have no recourse, no really feasible alternative, and sometimes you can't even opt out. People are forced to use Windows for pragmatic reasons every day. It's normal to be forced to use Windows for some purpose for which only Windows software is available. Microsoft has put a great deal of effort into, and waged dedicated war towards, ensuring that these non-choices are everywhere- that you can either be a Luddite with a ballpoint pen and legal pad, or you can run Windows: your choice, such as it is. This all leverages off proprietary software. By contrast, the less ornate Linux may have functional superiority over Windows in many ways, but the really serious difference is the property issue- you _own_ Linux. If you run software, typically you _own_ that as well, which extends to your being free to alter or change it in any way. It doesn't matter if _you_ personally can't code to save your life- if someone makes the new compression program work so that stuff you compress cannot be opened without the recipient purchasing new software themselves, like an 'upgrade virus', then you are free to encourage somebody who _can_ code to revise the program, fix the 'bug' and then fork development to route the course of software development around the developer who is trying to hold people's workflow and data hostage with an uncooperative format. This would happen so naturally, that it is a profound disincentive for open source developers to prey on their customers- and none of it requires that customers all be programmers- it only requires that there be one other programmer out there somewhere who believes people should get to own their own data and not be treated like peasants. This runs a hell of a lot deeper than ease of use, my friends- it frankly doesn't matter if linux is ten thousand times harder to use than Windows, _it_ still is the best place to stand if you care about rights to own data and software- if you give a damn about owning any of those bits on the HD, if you bridle at the notion that you're only borrowing it on sufferance from the higher authority which is so good as to permit you to rent bits of cyberspace, arrangements of electrons to store ideas or records or accounts- oop! but mustn't forget, they're not actually _your_ electrons, that arrangement of bits _belongs_ to Microsoft bucko, and you're only borrowing it. If your idea has to be TAKEN AWAY from you by error or as punishment that's just too bad- shoulda written it with a ballpoint if you're so anal as to think that you OWN any of it. Right? Linux is _the_ ideal high ground to take a stand against this- and what's really at stake is new meanings for the word 'property'. The central irony is that Linux is incessantly portrayed as communist and freedom-eroding, when in fact it is proprietary software itself that functions like known examples of historical Communism. It's proprietary software when you purchase a program and it only works a certain way and parts of it are broken and you can't fix them. It's proprietary software when you try to upgrade or change software and your data does not communicate properly and you're not allowed to pry into the inner workings of your own data to fix the problem- that's not your place to do so. It's proprietary software that behaves like Communism- but customers, users are the poor bastard peasantry, and the programmers end up as the Politburo, able to twist the knive any way they please, entirely insulated from any concern for the consequences of their actions- with regard to big corporations, there is an additional level of similarity, in that expansionism comes before everything, specifically before any concern with the peasantry, and this is never questioned for a moment. When was the last time Microsoft said, 'Gee, maybe the world might be a better place if we only controlled 3/4 of the users and other vendors got to go around serving the people whom for whatever reason don't like our flavor of computing- ya think?'. When people are backed against the wall, they can get noisy and desperate. To a large extent this is precisely what is happening with Linux. If you really care about ownership of your 'virtual property', data, software, OS, then you have no ground to give- you can do things like run MacOS but the _same_ issues constantly arise, until you feel that there's no hiding place anywhere, no way to coexist with this incredible movement taking power out of your hands and turning every computer-hosted property of yours over to central authorities of one sort or another, your rights withering and ebbing away, new laws springing up to punish you if you're fool enough to try and take that power back by reverse-engineering some of those cyber-toys that are Not Yours. Then you go with Linux, and hang onto it as a life raft, not so much because it's that phenomenally more refined or more effective than the commercial sector (though with a bit of enthusiastic work, often it becomes a personalized Linux that pleases you), but because you OWN it, and it cannot be taken away from you. It seems a reasonable tradeoff that programmers can't earn so much at it- they can't hold you hostage either, seems fair. You have a hard time understanding what 'right' the programmer classes have to jerk people around for a boost in the ol' profitability. You've done the equivalent of homesteading a cabin off in the boonies, with your own farm and flintlock musket, and you know that when you were given the choice of 'live free or die' you picked 'live free' even if it meant a bit of hard times. Doesn't seem so bad, since the peasantry have kinds of trouble that you don't ever tolerate anymore. It feels a little bit like the ol' Revolutionary War, where those proprietary software Redcoats were busting into your 'house' any time they wanted, charging taxes on your household stuff, taking no responsibility for damages, stealing information out of your house without asking you: and now you don't endure any of that, you just won't stand it, you feel about ready to write some kind of Declaration of Independence... And then, in a horrible trainwreck of mingling metaphors, the proprietary software Politburo looks down on you and your Colonial flintlock muskets and "Don't Tread On Me" patriotism, from their wealthy dachas and unchallenged power and Soviet-style expansionism and complete unconcern for the peasantry they're bleeding dry... And calls _you_ a Communist.
No, that's what some installers do on MacOS, and I hate hate hate it, too. It is intensely annoying because I tend to have my menus set up in a particular way, for a reason, and don't wish to have them disrupted. Linux is going to have to deal with people like me, because _I_ am the sort who actually goes and uses linux, gets it working, plays with shell scripts etc. Taking my control of my linux installation out of my hands leaves me with no reason to even bother with it anymore...
Apple did most of the work to make windowing _practical_. They came up with the mouse-semantics for how things worked, they were the ones who invented _regions_ . *geek block* regions == the irregular shapes of semi-covered windows, and Apple _invented_ methods for only having to refresh that area, not the whole window and then throw away all the hidden parts). Apple brought Quickdraw to the table and had everything going with useful graphics primitives and a whole visual toolbox and the ability to do multiple screens on a virtual 'screen space'. Xerox had _none_ of this- they had the initial spark of inspiration without which Apple would have been pretty lost (Quickdraw without windowing systems? hmmm) By the way, contextual menus were present in _Smalltalk_ which predates almost anything. It sure predates NeXT, it might predate X: smalltalk is cool and forbiddingly geeky and it's alive and well to this very day. Smalltalk did _everything_ off contextual menus, up to and including the ability to run lines of code you just typed in, simply by picking 'run' from the contextual menu. It was astonishing, especially for its day. The modern Smalltalk is delightfully hackerish and makes me want to learn how to program Smalltalk the language, just because 'living' inside a vast construction of code that you have total access to and can reprogram ON THE FLY seems unutterably cool. I don't actually know if there is anything particularly useful you can do in it, or whether the language you must program with is as approachable as it seems. But it sure _looks_ cool:)
A Packard fscking _bell_ at twice the price of an iMac is an answer to what, exactly? I was quite prepared to go 'oh dear, still it's good for Apple to see some competition in this area', but this is _ridiculous_. Is that the best the industry can do? It's _pathetic_. Keep all the cheesy misfeatures but make it cost _less_ than the iMac thank you, otherwise it's a sick joke. I can't believe that you end up getting more linux for your money from _Apple_ hardware, it's just ludicrous. That certainly is not why _I_ use Apple hardware, and I'm not wealthy. What is going on, when in a particular definable category of computing (goofy industrial designs;) ) the PC versions are completely inferior in, of all things, price/performance? And have just as much proprietary junk as Apple always had? Is this going to continue and become true for more mainstream computers, too?
"You can modify any page here, and add your questions, answers, and examples of Squeak code". Eeep! We are talking ITS (Incompatible Timesharing System) out there and alive on the Web! How is it that nobody noticed this happening? Just looked at the whole main front page. Damn if it isn't the simple truth! Forget 'weblogs', that's tame and tiresome- 'Swikis' are clearly the novel concept. Yes, there are old versions, yes it can be reverted (with a certain amount of tedious cut+paste) from backups in the case of wilful destruction, but by God if it isn't ITS (intentional total lack of) security all over again, with the same social contract and extended trust. I could have tweeked out the HTML all I wanted- that's what it's about. So could you. Of course I didn't- I don't know enough about Squeak to contribute- yet. I hope people get the same shock of recognition that I had, and realize, 'Damn- this _is_ my page! They don't even know who I am but I get to edit the HTML of it anyhow.' I hope whatever slashdotters are slashdotting all these sites (one was already tottering under the load) can understand the freedom of this. It's like the freedom of linux coding only applied to a shared web space. I think this is wonderful. I had no idea anyone was doing anything this daring, this cool.
You're not alone: I get precisely the same sense. I wonder who, out there, has read the reviews in the Interface Hall of Shame? How many developers are wittingly or unwittingly cloning Windows desktop behaviors (not to mention stuff like Explorer! ack!) without questioning whether this is really an effective approach? I think that needs to be questioned. I think (and this is a mac dude saying this) desktops need to be questioned, the whole Mac legacy needs to be questioned. If people want that, they know where to go. What else might be possible?
I have to wholeheartedly agree here. DFL spent 4 years with W95/NT: I've spent comparable time with various MacOSes. Apart from basic file management duties (which I don't see _any_ Linux desktop doing properly, and indeed don't see Windows doing properly either) I don't see what the point is to having a desktop _at_ _all_. Look, this was neat stuff ten years ago- but just because it's only coming around to Linux in recent years doesn't mean it's _that_ great an idea. It's nothing more than a visual orientation tool, and this is only a reminder of the _real_ state of the filesystem, an imaginary picture and not the true status of the computer. The positions icons are in do not 'exist' in any relevant sense, to the computer. They are arbitrary. Drag and drop is great- hell, I very often use my MacOS partitions and extensively use drag and drop, and it's totally prevalent in MacOS and works quite consistently- but there are only so many ways I use it, in the long run, and all of these ways could be implemented some other way. Selection in X is so screwy it's a moot point that it isn't drag and drop- and the other use I find is dragging selected text (always text) to the desktop and making a clipping. There are other ways I could get that result, because all it really is, is copying the active selection to a file- that's ALL it is, it's just done with a motion rather than a command. I have linuxPPC running with a medium-old Window Maker and am well pleased with it, and run nothing resembling a 'desktop'. That's what multiple terms and the applications menu are for, and the latter allows tricks I couldn't begin to do from a 'desktop' with limited action grammar (I'd have to make special aliases to script the running of special other programs in combination- yuck! Not appropriate for use with MacOS). I have linux (RH 5.1, heavily stripped) running on a _486_ at work with 16M of ram and a mere 240M hard drive, and _that_ runs an old Window Maker and is quite happy with it (and also runs aterms- with the option of making them transparent. Yah- transparent terms on a 486. Very nice way to run console apps on severely limited systems- it's not all that slow, even) I agree with DFL: I see _no_ significant benefit to a linux 'desktop'. Why, why? I suppose I can see putting icons on the screen, but you don't _have_ to... and anyhow WM offers dock and clip and stuff to let icons be present. I've found, personally, after many years of using a very determined desktop environment, that I find it soothing and kind of Zen to have an empty space where the desktop would be- or a nice picture uncluttered by objects (save the clip- or even sans both dock and clip), or an Afterstep-inspired animated xlockmore background, like star -batchcount 200 -size 20 -trek 0 -straight (or laser, if I want to be veryveryalertandawake!) Maybe it is simply that people who have used Mac or Windows for years and become very familiar with desktops are more open to looking at other approaches and thinking they are _better_ than what (to the old Windows or Mac user) seems like the old-fashioned way of doing things? When using Linux, I find that the idea of a desktop with icons to launch programs and menubars/taskbars on the screen etc etc etc seems intolerably limiting and trite... I guess it takes all kinds... how many other Mac/Windows users actively try to set up Linux so it behaves different from anything they are familiar with?
If his job is that bad... If his boss is devising new ways to make it even worse just to keep him from going near _you_ and your oasis... If his boss is working out contracts removing more and more of his rights and turning him into property rather than an employee...
MAYBE HE BETTER FSCKING QUIT HIS JOB.
Be more ruthless, people. Sympathy is earned, not to be taken for granted. If you see slaves, do you feed 'em and save their owner the expense of feeding their property, give them water saving their owner the expense of bothering to find water for them, do you take over all the responsibilities of the owner without asking for the injustice of their situation to be changed- or do you save your efforts for the ones trying to break free?
You can't. This is a suicidal strategy. You can't make sure anything runs better on Windows, because you do not own it. You can't count on reverse engineering, because legislation is being forced through to make that a crime. You can't significantly help free software by establishing beachheads of it on MacOS and Windows, because it is a luxury on those platforms, easily outmaneuvered in flash and glitz by proprietary vendors, and it cannot be certain the APIs it relies on are the true APIs- the vendor can change the rules of the game at any time. Hell, I _program_ GPLed free software on MacOS, and I don't think this is a sane strategy. I program that way because I _use_ MacOS and because I want there to be GPLed software there, not because I have any illusion that this will cause Mac market share to be lost to Linux because I'm putting GPLed stuff there. It is not- the stuff that I write can only _increase_ the market share of MacOS. I'm OK with this, it could do with a bit of increasing and is a nice weird option to have around the industry, plus easy to maintain:) If you want to get market share for Linux then present people with no option- the arrogance of commercial software will do the rest.
The one thing you can be pretty certain of is that Unix perl scripts running on Unix hosts are pretty well immune. The source to it is available, and it's not subject to being seized or perverted. What MS will be doing if they want to play hardball is this: breaking Unix perl scripts for THEIR OWN PEOPLE. Making little changes so only MS-Perl runs properly, and scripts from the archives or scripts from Unix that shouldn't be causing problems, would cause problems or fail. I don't know exactly how this would be done- it'd be syntactic- but this is definitely what would be happening. Again: they would break it FOR THEIR OWN PEOPLE, w.r.t running scripts from the Unix community. This is a dangerous tactic because if they do it too much (combined with all the lovely license and 'user protection' schemes they're into), the temptation will simply be to abandon ship entirely. However, that is a risk they have to take because their only real option is to poison their own well- to make MS-Perl begin to act incompatibly and hope they can load so many examples into it that people will still choose that fork- this in spite of the fact that someone could try to make another Win32 Perl to compete with MS-Perl (at least until legislation is passed that is draconian enough about reverse engineering to make this awkward to impossible- in that case they would change Win32 just a bit and not update the docs and then the choices (for that API) become 'fail' or 'break the law') Expect MS Perl to not run *nix perl scripts forever- however, the example given ('my perl script running on a *nix server') _would_ be safe as the script only has to run on *nix, and the Win32 browser does not have to run it. Perhaps they will build it into IE and attempt to get people to make MS-Perl scripts that run on the client, not the server. After all, IIS seems not to be the most effective way of producing dynamic content anyhow, and offloading that dreadful processing load could be a real win:)
Very 1984-esque. As the phrase goes, 'may you live in interesting times'. This is the digital equivalent of the period just before the American Revolution, FWIW. I have to sympathize with the people who argue, 'no! Don't let this pass, it will do immeasurable damage even if it _does_ force the issue of free software and make it almost unavoidable'. I sympathize a great deal, because it is deeply disturbing to watch an industry develop a choke-hold over technology, government- anytime an entity is legally allowed to hold _sole_ discretion over the survival of another entity, be that a company or a person's records or, hell, a government's records... then you have real trouble. Power corrupts, and that is more power than most people would know what to do with- especially when we're talking about the privilege to on the one hand define an industry standard operating system (yah, 'doze...) and then withhold it at whim regardless of damages. That's _damned_ scary. And yet, I am not convinced 'we the people' have the power to reform this in time. I believe this or something like it will go through- and our humanitarian concerns (wishing business, government not to be subject to a reign of terror) will not save the intended victims of this ghastly power-seize. I think it will go through, and our world will quietly change into an Orwellian nightmare around us- with respect to proprietary software. And there will be no ground to give and no chance of negotiation- the only choices will be to submit or to _fully_ go for free software and disclaim even the idea of interoperability with the proprietary stuff- it simply will not be in the interests of proprietary software to pretend anymore. Where this might get very ugly is protocols and networking. It won't kill anyone if computer joysticks or certain printers can't be used with open source products- this already occurs. However, attacking the networked infrastructure of the world would be deadly, and it's hard to imagine anything more important than defending the ability of the world to communicate- we cannot balkanize, we can't afford another Dark Ages, we must protect the ability of people everywhere to network with each other and exchange ideas, viewpoints, dialogue. This was important even when the danger was only proprietary stuff crowding out the older stuff and refusing to interoperate- how much more dangerous when the proprietary stuff is to be operated only by the graces of a centralised authority? This would be Jon Postel's worst nightmare, perhaps beyond his imagining. We are looking at war. Whether or not it turns out as bad as it might, it's best to remain firmly aware that we are looking at the prospects of literal war over these issues. There are too many parallels with civil liberties issues- first trespass into people's software 'homes', then negligence and the refusal to take responsibility for damages to said property, and now it's to be legal for companies to destroy my data or seize it without due process on _their_ notion that I did something wrong? Does this begin to sound eerily familiar to those who have learned anything about the American Revolution? We _are_ looking at war, and we are probably stuck with it. For me, well: I can't be terribly impressed with some of the scuzball freedomfighters, any more than the colonists were an impressive aristocratic lot. Seems like there are a lot of script kiddies in the ranks- that ego runs riot, mine included- that politicking is rampant, the whole troupe seems like either blowhards or rugrats up against trained troops with big budgets. Yet I know damned well which side I'm on- there's no possible compromise, and my mood is more and more like the Boston hotheads causing trouble for the colonies in 1776. It's the grand imposing impressiveness of a small, mange-ridden cornered rat- and the same desperation, born of the total lack of other options. I'm posting this from a small town in Vermont, in the United States of America, and will soon be visiting my family in Lexington- where the Redcoats marched, shed Colonist blood, and were cut down themselves in the start of the war for independence. WE WON, DAMN IT. Remember that when this nightmarish cybertyranny madness gets oppressive. Supposing the laws are passed and working on reverse-engineered projects becomes ten years and $100,000 minimum, supposing this is quickly taken advantage of to render everything that seemed to be good strategy (Samba, windows-like interfaces, ability to talk to NT Server...) useless. Guess what? That's war for you. If you don't like it, you can knuckle under and bootlick, or you can fight back using any means at your disposal. The outcome is not pre-ordained- and there comes a point where fear, uncertainty and doubt no longer matter because there is no longer an option to bootlick. With this legislation and what it represents, I see that point approaching, and I choose to call it war, just as much a war as any physical war.
*ROFL* No, I don't think so... but then, you weren't to know that 'geeking' already has a meaning. Geeking is what a crack head does when they can't get their crack- sort of vibrating and sweating and going insane and paranoid and out of control:) Therefore, Windows geeking is not surprising, but making a filter for the GIMP would hardly qualify- at least not if the filter is to be any good:) one might almost say that in order for programming to be geeking, the results have to not have any comments _and_ not compile:)
'Tain't really code per se. It's more or less just what Red Hat does, only with a very different 'style'. It's just a Window Maker-managed Linux with pretty much all the GUI config tools taken out (no tcl/tk, no gtk) and a fair amount of console stuff. pico and pilot are added to help deal with the initial learning curve, and I've included _lots_ of hitherto unseen textures for backgrounds and all my linux graphics and desktops- I need to clear the lots-of-textures as they are 'harvested' from another program's output. I may or may not come up with cool scripts, but I am in the process of taking basically the package list from the install and _annotating_ it- should prove to be interesting reading, and contains _lots_ of critical information, such as information about how, when you run 'at' and drop into the subshell, in order to finish and return to the interactive shell, you _must_ type control-D in order to close the subshell- nothing else will help- plus fun stuff like a review of bc leading the hapless newbie through 256+256, then 256*256, then 256^256 (whereupon newbie boggles and jaw drops), then for fun it's suggested to try 1024^1024:) Well, anyway- maybe that bit will be the most useful one! DOCUMENTATION! It's from a relentlessly text-oriented viewpoint, but this is all stuff pretty much everybody has, just maybe isn't using- and that's just not right. Though some of it, well... I have to admit I get a bit satirical about stuff like awk:)
Slashdot Mirror
And when the fat, stodgy and arrogant Microsoft works with the fat, stodgy and arrogant AOL and gets all the fat, stodgy and arrogant ISPs and network backbones to run only fat, stodgy and arrogant AOMS software, and passes legislation making it criminal to attempt to deconstruct such work causing a natural, easy takeover of everybody's communications infrastructure, where are you going to escape _to_?
Jon Postel is dead. I'm not sure whether I'm happy he doesn't have to see this, or sad that he isn't around to fight it. You simply don't know your danger. What you are moving towards is feudalism, top-down government without representation or recourse, and you only like it because computer geeks get to be the feudal barons. If somebody suggested that your state Senator (assuming you're in the USA- I think you must surely be, Europe loves feudalism less as they actually live with it here and there) ought to become your King and take all authority from the federal government, you'd flip out! How dare he!
I think the way the US government works, particularly in this case, is deeply flawed but probably the best we can expect.
No way: that's totally unacceptable, and your ignorance is not an excuse, and while value neutrality is fine and good there is always a limit.
In the event that AOL and Microsoft _are_ finding it better to divide up ownership of the world by using this convenient opportunity to pretend to be battling while simultaneously buying up everybody else out there, only to turn around when the dust settles and go 'tadah! There Can Be Only One'- what, exactly, do you propose to do about it? Your attitude is totally unhelpful _before_ the disaster. Do you have any better plans for _after_ this seizure of power (it's lovely how the appearance of _two_ huge powers seems to make it OK for those powers to be eating up everything else- lovely until they turn out to be cooperating in this...), or are you simply going to retreat to a fscking armed compound with no electricity or phone service?
'scuse the ferocity, but I hadn't considered how effective MS/AOL collaboration would be for both companies- they're somewhat orthogonal and could help each other, and pretending to fight _now_ is one hell of a smokescreen- and the instant I get tipped off by MOSR to consider the idea, I come here and suddenly there's no such thing as trusts- feh!
You obviously don't know the Classics. We are specifically talking a Mac Classic, normal HD, running system 6 without any extensions. It boots in fourteen seconds from flipping the switch to being able to select or launch something in the Finder. You totally don't know Classics very well. They may not be good for much, but every one I've seen boots insanely fast. I think a lot of stuff was simply stuck in ROM, though I haven't inspected the Classic ROM anytime lately.
Actually, it boots in _thirteen_ seconds from switch to Finder, but I called it fourteen because thirteen was unlucky (you see? it _was_ unlucky! takes it a whole extra second now!)
My 9500 which is the _serious_ machine (and dualboots linuxppc, of course) takes much much longer to boot, over 30 seconds. So did my old performa 575. Classics are very special in some ways, and they boot up so fast it'd make your head spin- I think if you start giving them system 7 etc. then it slows down, but I'm sorry, I've timed it and you are flat wrong. It _is_ damn near an order of magnitude faster to boot than your G3. What's so wrong about that?
See the difference?
In the first case this gets deeply into the new perspective on code- that gee, it never _does_ seem to be totally finished, so what you're paying for is the active work of a bunch of programmers. The resulting object is no more tangible than the tape-recorded voices of hired mediators in a nasty dispute- this is not about the _result_, it's about hiring people who can execute the process and come up with the answer to that situation, and each situation will be different.
Programmers are like talking-professionals, expressing themselves in programming languages to solve that day's problems. The result (as ESR has resoundingly figured out) is valueless very quickly, but can be intensely valuable right at the moment. You're not buying an heirloom item, you're buying the expertise by which a programmer can perfectly adapt code to the needs of the moment to solve problems for you.
In that second case, where MS takes software away from you, this reveals a continuing total failure to understand where the value actually lies. This concept actually comes from MS, which wishes to rent its software so you can't own it and can't keep it. It overlooks the fact that last year's software does not retain its value acceptably- it's like a bullying tactic, needless. Most people will not _want_ the known-buggy, out of date last year's software anyhow- and those with a reason to stay with a version that works for them will be arbitrarily punished. It's a lose-lose situation because if someone was going to upgrade, they'd upgrade anyhow- and if someone won't, punishing them for it will not appreciably change their decision.
The really ironic thing is this: Microsoft's rampant selling of windows alphas might be the smartest healthiest thing they could do compared to these other ideas. That's charging people to keep pace with the continuing work of programmers. The difference with this and open source is that in the MS case, you have no access to the programmers, where in open source, what you'd do is go to them, throw money and say 'code me THIS!' and have them develop exactly what you want. Then you are the first to have it, and though it becomes part of the global source library, presumably you asked for the new thing for a _reason_, a practical reason like having a special web hosting service that needs to do THIS really well, for which you already have buyers and mindshare. If you can execute on the potential of an open source software tool better than your competition, then you win that competition- it's as easy as that, and has nothing to do with hoarding special bits of code.
A little example is co-opnet.org, a cooperative website compiled from a set of work files, like a non-JIT perl site or something. I'm actually on the board of directors of the nonprofit corporation co-opnet.org has evolved into- and I'm also the author of the GPLed sitebuilding software that the site is made from. Anybody could take this software (it's Mac-based but hey- you have source!) and try to get business with it but _we_ know nonprofits, _we_ know the ropes, _we_ can execute better than Joe Schmoe who comes around and thinks he can take our clients. We're only barely begun (gonna get a real ISP hosting setup together, for starters, currently it's a virtual hosting service that's not going to survive slashdotting in the slightest) but what we're doing, EVEN THOUGH it hinges on the use of special software to make a website that's maintained in a certain way, does not require that said software be proprietary.
This is what I see companies like Microsoft as missing- it's not about the _software_ at all, it's about the tasks being done with that software. With Quicken, are you buying dialog boxes and GUI and a database? No- you're buying a promise that your money will be managed responsibly for you (a promise that isn't being kept, to hear some reports from that area). With Office, are you buying fancy text objects and spreadsheets, the code of that? No, you're buying the promise that you will be helped to communicate more persuasively, to keep your accounts in a more enlightening manner, to calculate and extrapolate things you wouldn't be able to figure out otherwise. In this light the _wizards_ and example files and stationery files are by far the most important part of the product (and they are mostly data!) and the actual code fades into meaninglessness.
How much hatred for Microsoft would be justified if they chilled out, stopped trying to kill other technology, and focussed on being _the_ place for lusers and pointy-haired bosses to go and be walked through the creation of good business letters, home finance spreadsheets, business plans, you name it? That's their gift- they do have the patience for that, and few Linux people could remotely rival them in that area. Yet, it's so very centered on _process_ and not the mockery of property that applications currently are... (okay, so you can have _one_ copy of this string of bits, but it has to stay on this machine, and after a while is it okay if we pretend that it doesn't work and ask you to never use that string of bits again? Oh, and though you bought the box the string of bits came in, don't even think about looking at them or we'll put you in prison...)
Process is the direction to look in, for the turn of the century. No matter how many nifty tools are devised, people simply will not know what to do with them unless they are told- or better still, coached through it in an interactive, personal sense. Much of this coaching, being language and imagery, can easily fall under copyright simply because it is not computer code, but human expression, and it could be considered separate from the actual computer code which could be open source- but, then, even this is thinking too small- really, what the future holds is this:
Face it: if Microsoft did that for a living, it would _rule_. They are admirably suited to doing it, and it wouldn't have to step on anybody's toes. THAT is process, and with a little effort they'd be better at it than anyone- and could clear the field and leave computer software to be developed by and for the users and hackers- they'd be doing what they do best, handholding, and would not have to deal with what they do worst, actual performance and lasting value.
There is money to be made from _use_ of software as a service, and let's leave the coding to people who specialize in it, rather than trying to slant it heavily so that laymen supposedly can do sysadmin type things. Let Linux diversify in a thousand ways and become ubitiquous- and let Microsoft be the helpdesk to the world, not the IT chief.
The sooner they figure this out the better off they shall be- every dollar they spend on trying to retain hold of protocols and standards is a dollar WASTED, a dollar that they are not spending in trying to be the paid consultant to a world full of kids researching term papers and Moms trying to keep family accounts for tax purposes and Dads trying to put together a really great trout fishing boat.
Huh? Such as? From ESR I see ideas like "In other words, software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.". This is startlingly apt- and explains otherwise inexplicable things about the Linux movement, not to mention where the profitability really is in the broader PC industry! Your counterexample is? You're not specifying. ;)
Personally, in contrast to the fellow who said 'I support RMS's ideas because I believe in utopia', I support RMS's ideas because I do _not_ believe in utopia... somebody mentioned how RMS is the way he is because he pretty well got chased out of the MIT AI lab by proprietary software. No hackers anymore to talk with- just users and competing proprietary LISP machines- now fast forward a few years- where are they now? Nowhere. This killed off a healthy software ecology and died off in meaningless conflicts leaving _nothing_ in its place, wasting a huge amount of time and effort. My personal take on that history is that it is rather disgusting. Hard to see how the people could have acted differently at the time- but still disgusting.
In theory, capitalistic jealously guarded intellectual property might result in progress. In the real world it appears to be all too susceptible to stagnation and corruption- software rot, feature creep, attempts to prolong the useful life of some code long after it is dead. In contrast to the usual use of Microsoft as a culprit, I'll say that Netscape (the traditional, not Mozilla) is a great example of closed software rot and failure to develop acceptably. By contrast, you have something like Apache- when matched in benchmarks it loses to IIS, but in actual normal use (its true purpose) it's been proven resilient, effective and in many cases (such as heavy latency or really varied load atypical to controlled intranet-like tests) it's greatly superior to IIS in practice. If it was a classic commercial product- there would be no alternative but to slant things the same way as IIS does, and get them to perform equally well on benches and equally unreliably in the real world (there are always tradeoffs). Since it is open source and maintained by those who actually run it, the likelihood is that it will continue to be optimized for real use EVEN IF that means it continues to do poorly at strange and artificial benchmarks. ESR talks almost as big as Alvin Toffler, but he happens to be trying to understand that real world which you (the above AC) do not seem to comprehend. Pragmatism rules most things. If open source leads to healthier software then it will continue to thrive, whether you can accept its politics and morals or whether you think them hopelessly naive. It's still early yet- wait and see, but don't wait too long. The open source train is at the station, and there comes a time when you have to make up your mind to get on, or you'll just have a hell of a lot of running to do to catch up later
Well, my Mac Classic boots in 14 seconds (all the classics boot _real_ fast w. system 6). Your point is?
No no no....
Mindcraft: "Sir, you've attacked my integrity"
The World: "Yes."
Absolutely. It was shocking to see that remark to the effect that 'bad advocacy killed OS/2': you'd think Slashdot would be better informed about the Microsoft antitrust case.
Anybody with a strong interest in seeing Microsoft continue to expand and destroy until there aren't any other choices at all, would of course be strongly in favor of blaming bad advocacy. It sounds sort of plausible, it allows a useful fiction that individual consumers control the industry and can make or break distribution channels merely by their whims, and it's a useful smokescreen to cover up the fact that a software trust has been putting the screws to everybody it can, for at least ten years. If you truly believe that bad advocacy killed OS/2, then it's a very easy step to conclude that the thing to do is practice only _good_ advocacy, and trust that niceness and reasonable dialogue will persuade manufacturers who are being presented with ultimatums of "enough with this Linux now that the trial's over, otherwise we will multiply your license fees by 10 times and lower your worst competitor's by 10 percent just to break you".
If you really believe that good advocacy and civil polite discourse will persuade key distribution channels to permit the existence of Linux when faced with penalties of that scale, then please ask Tinkerbell to sprinkle some fairy dust on the linux kernel to make it faster, as you might as well believe in her too.
We'll be lucky if they don't have open-source-derived software declared an obscenity to be blocked from network transmission, if we seriously go around acting like good advocacy will be enough. We are at war. Of course Mindcraft lied. They're at war too- just on the other side. If they _did_ allow us to pay them to slant the other way, they'd never see work from MS or any commercial vendor again. They have to pick their side and stay with it, and they will- it's too late to stop now.
Foul language and brutal accusations of treachery are not _unwarranted_, they are just totally _unhelpful_. Often such outbursts aren't worth the temporary feelings of relief and self-righteousness they bring. Get used to the idea of not doing this: it's not because such attacks are _unfair_, no! The point is, this is too serious for mucking around like that! It's no joke. _Legislation_ is being railroaded through every which way to support the Microsoft trust in particular, and to render proprietary software free of any responsibility in general. If the government antitrust case doesn't end in radical adjustments, then what? I'll tell you what: cursing and reviling people is going to seem damned inadequate at that point. It won't help anymore, when your ISP goes under/is bought out/develops its IT committment to standardize fully on MS/IP or whatever might be waiting out there- it is not unthinkable that the world's communication infrastructure could end up collectively owned by various trusts with no tolerance anymore for anything but the technological mainstream. Linux will not be _outlawed_, necessarily- but you'll have to call up BBSes again, because the Net will be off limits- and reverse engineering the protocols will mean jail time, and getting caught communicating will prove guilt. There are situations where you would be _assigned_ a computer just in order to pay taxes and be a citizen- given enough economizing and reduction of cost and given continued emphasis on standardisation, the 'citizen's PC' is not unthinkable. You'd better believe tampering with it would be against the law.
Welcome to '2004'. This screed has been in the true spirit of Orwell's '1984': a desperate attempt to paint things _so_ black that reality could not rival it. If you think it's incomprehensibly outrageous, consider this: if I'd made it less vitriolic, reality would have already outstripped it. We're living amid the first virtual war, and few people can comprehend it as yet: by the time the regular person finds that their existence is centrally monitored and entirely regulated through a private company in Redmond, by the time that company, having nothing left to conquer, moves in on government itself (who saw the report on the Microsoft 'game' in New York, of hunting terrorists? WHY are Microsofties _training_ as _cops_? All in good fun, never mind all that equipment...) then it will be too late for anything but _physical_ war. And that should not have to happen...
Me, I don't write to people like Mindcraft. I wouldn't know what to say to them. They don't know their danger. People don't understand the nature of power- the instant it regroups and begins building under a new guise, it's the fable of the Blind Men and the Elephant again- it's a treetrunk! it's a snake! it's a wall!
It is power. Raw power on a scale beyond all third-world countries and beginning to be beyond some of the big-leaguers. And because they're not training troops (and _why_ were Microsoft managers 'hunting terrorists' with thousands of dollars' worth of technical support in New York City? Are they really satisfied with being a shoddy merchant anymore? WHY are they rehearsing such cop-games, what's putting it in their heads to recreate in such a manner?), people want to behave like they're the same entity that was running around in Bellevue, Washington, coding 'Typing Tutor'.
People who flip out at stuff like the Mindcraft reports are only reacting instinctively to something they don't properly understand- a quiet but pervasive shifting of power all over the world. Information is power. Control of information is serious power. It's rather childish to behave like old men sitting around in judge's robes and senators' suits are still the top of the totem pole, still the authority figure. They are not what they used to be- they don't move fast enough- sooner or later, they've got to go.
This doesn't have to be the future, but placing a trusting childlike faith in the power of the individual and the charm of civilized advocacy is not a helpful move. We're at war: maybe a new kind of war, but a war. We already know many of the terms- Microsoft, for one, has leaked some of their plans (such as the subversion of common standards, something which would have been noticed anyway). I'm only saying that it would be out of character for them to stop there, or to think small.
Anybody wishing to believe that Microsoft (or anyone in their singular position) shows respect for limits, or thinks small and humble, may go on doing so all they wish, but are implored to not weary wiser people with their inexplicable beliefs.
This is what really ticks me off: that people can decide to target the whole essential concept that I and other techs I know are _desperate_ for. I'm sorry- open source is not negotiable, that's why I release occasional code under GPL and not, say, a BSD license or public domain. ;) However, what a lot of people are overlooking is this: WE OWN IT!
We are _constantly_ harassed by manifestations of proprietary software, of closedness. _This_ CD-Rom simply thrown away because you can't get it to connect to anything but a Sony MB, _that_ monitor gathering dust because it requires a funky cable to even work, _this_ new compression software upgrade featuring a wonderful new format that causes the previous version to download the whole file and silently delete it on failure to expand it, _that_ web browser rewriting global image file mappings every time it runs. I could go on and on, and I could start to make stuff up, and I'll bet you proprietary software will equal or surpass the most horrible things I can even imagine. After all, it's becoming legal for them to bear no responsibility for anything, and it might even become illegal for you to even _try_ to find out what this stuff is surreptitiously doing- so _what_ is stopping closedware from becoming even more insanely manipulative, destructive and inadequate? Not 'quality': guess what? When people don't have a choice, it's more profitable to turn the screws on them. A free market only exists when people can _legitimately_ jump to something else, when nothing can hold them hostage. The very nature of data makes it a damned good hostage, and all the better when it's proprietary and you're not allowed to deconstruct your _own_ data, only to edit and view it- and the next logical step after reverse engineering is made illegal is to make the reverse engineering of data formats illegal.
Well, there's an element of truth in a lot of the whining against Linux. It is still awkward, maybe even more awkward than Windows is, there is little chance of making a lot of profit in it, and its mama dresses it funny
We _OWN_ it. I don't care if it seems clunky, or if it doesn't seem like a classic money-spinner business opportunity. Some of us consider computers and the worldwide networking and connectivity now available to people as _important_ things: things of tangible value in and of themselves regardless of whether the interface is slick or clunky or takes a few days or weeks to master. The problem is this: the power is being centralized in very much the wrong hands- in some ways proprietary software, particularly Microsoft, is similar to the Soviet Union at its most repressive, because the power is all centralized with people you can't vote out or protest to. You're a total peon, a helpless peasant who has to endure whatever the ruling power feels like decreeing, because you have no say in what goes on, and in a very large number of cases you have no recourse, no really feasible alternative, and sometimes you can't even opt out. People are forced to use Windows for pragmatic reasons every day. It's normal to be forced to use Windows for some purpose for which only Windows software is available. Microsoft has put a great deal of effort into, and waged dedicated war towards, ensuring that these non-choices are everywhere- that you can either be a Luddite with a ballpoint pen and legal pad, or you can run Windows: your choice, such as it is.
This all leverages off proprietary software.
By contrast, the less ornate Linux may have functional superiority over Windows in many ways, but the really serious difference is the property issue- you _own_ Linux. If you run software, typically you _own_ that as well, which extends to your being free to alter or change it in any way. It doesn't matter if _you_ personally can't code to save your life- if someone makes the new compression program work so that stuff you compress cannot be opened without the recipient purchasing new software themselves, like an 'upgrade virus', then you are free to encourage somebody who _can_ code to revise the program, fix the 'bug' and then fork development to route the course of software development around the developer who is trying to hold people's workflow and data hostage with an uncooperative format. This would happen so naturally, that it is a profound disincentive for open source developers to prey on their customers- and none of it requires that customers all be programmers- it only requires that there be one other programmer out there somewhere who believes people should get to own their own data and not be treated like peasants.
This runs a hell of a lot deeper than ease of use, my friends- it frankly doesn't matter if linux is ten thousand times harder to use than Windows, _it_ still is the best place to stand if you care about rights to own data and software- if you give a damn about owning any of those bits on the HD, if you bridle at the notion that you're only borrowing it on sufferance from the higher authority which is so good as to permit you to rent bits of cyberspace, arrangements of electrons to store ideas or records or accounts- oop! but mustn't forget, they're not actually _your_ electrons, that arrangement of bits _belongs_ to Microsoft bucko, and you're only borrowing it. If your idea has to be TAKEN AWAY from you by error or as punishment that's just too bad- shoulda written it with a ballpoint if you're so anal as to think that you OWN any of it. Right?
Linux is _the_ ideal high ground to take a stand against this- and what's really at stake is new meanings for the word 'property'. The central irony is that Linux is incessantly portrayed as communist and freedom-eroding, when in fact it is proprietary software itself that functions like known examples of historical Communism. It's proprietary software when you purchase a program and it only works a certain way and parts of it are broken and you can't fix them. It's proprietary software when you try to upgrade or change software and your data does not communicate properly and you're not allowed to pry into the inner workings of your own data to fix the problem- that's not your place to do so. It's proprietary software that behaves like Communism- but customers, users are the poor bastard peasantry, and the programmers end up as the Politburo, able to twist the knive any way they please, entirely insulated from any concern for the consequences of their actions- with regard to big corporations, there is an additional level of similarity, in that expansionism comes before everything, specifically before any concern with the peasantry, and this is never questioned for a moment. When was the last time Microsoft said, 'Gee, maybe the world might be a better place if we only controlled 3/4 of the users and other vendors got to go around serving the people whom for whatever reason don't like our flavor of computing- ya think?'.
When people are backed against the wall, they can get noisy and desperate. To a large extent this is precisely what is happening with Linux. If you really care about ownership of your 'virtual property', data, software, OS, then you have no ground to give- you can do things like run MacOS but the _same_ issues constantly arise, until you feel that there's no hiding place anywhere, no way to coexist with this incredible movement taking power out of your hands and turning every computer-hosted property of yours over to central authorities of one sort or another, your rights withering and ebbing away, new laws springing up to punish you if you're fool enough to try and take that power back by reverse-engineering some of those cyber-toys that are Not Yours.
Then you go with Linux, and hang onto it as a life raft, not so much because it's that phenomenally more refined or more effective than the commercial sector (though with a bit of enthusiastic work, often it becomes a personalized Linux that pleases you), but because you OWN it, and it cannot be taken away from you. It seems a reasonable tradeoff that programmers can't earn so much at it- they can't hold you hostage either, seems fair. You have a hard time understanding what 'right' the programmer classes have to jerk people around for a boost in the ol' profitability. You've done the equivalent of homesteading a cabin off in the boonies, with your own farm and flintlock musket, and you know that when you were given the choice of 'live free or die' you picked 'live free' even if it meant a bit of hard times. Doesn't seem so bad, since the peasantry have kinds of trouble that you don't ever tolerate anymore. It feels a little bit like the ol' Revolutionary War, where those proprietary software Redcoats were busting into your 'house' any time they wanted, charging taxes on your household stuff, taking no responsibility for damages, stealing information out of your house without asking you: and now you don't endure any of that, you just won't stand it, you feel about ready to write some kind of Declaration of Independence...
And then, in a horrible trainwreck of mingling metaphors, the proprietary software Politburo looks down on you and your Colonial flintlock muskets and "Don't Tread On Me" patriotism, from their wealthy dachas and unchallenged power and Soviet-style expansionism and complete unconcern for the peasantry they're bleeding dry...
And calls _you_ a Communist.
No, that's what some installers do on MacOS, and I hate hate hate it, too. It is intensely annoying because I tend to have my menus set up in a particular way, for a reason, and don't wish to have them disrupted.
Linux is going to have to deal with people like me, because _I_ am the sort who actually goes and uses linux, gets it working, plays with shell scripts etc. Taking my control of my linux installation out of my hands leaves me with no reason to even bother with it anymore...
Apple did most of the work to make windowing _practical_. They came up with the mouse-semantics for how things worked, they were the ones who invented _regions_ . :)
*geek block* regions == the irregular shapes of semi-covered windows, and Apple _invented_ methods for only having to refresh that area, not the whole window and then throw away all the hidden parts). Apple brought Quickdraw to the table and had everything going with useful graphics primitives and a whole visual toolbox and the ability to do multiple screens on a virtual 'screen space'. Xerox had _none_ of this- they had the initial spark of inspiration without which Apple would have been pretty lost (Quickdraw without windowing systems? hmmm)
By the way, contextual menus were present in _Smalltalk_ which predates almost anything. It sure predates NeXT, it might predate X: smalltalk is cool and forbiddingly geeky and it's alive and well to this very day. Smalltalk did _everything_ off contextual menus, up to and including the ability to run lines of code you just typed in, simply by picking 'run' from the contextual menu. It was astonishing, especially for its day. The modern Smalltalk is delightfully hackerish and makes me want to learn how to program Smalltalk the language, just because 'living' inside a vast construction of code that you have total access to and can reprogram ON THE FLY seems unutterably cool. I don't actually know if there is anything particularly useful you can do in it, or whether the language you must program with is as approachable as it seems. But it sure _looks_ cool
A Packard fscking _bell_ at twice the price of an iMac is an answer to what, exactly? I was quite prepared to go 'oh dear, still it's good for Apple to see some competition in this area', but this is _ridiculous_. Is that the best the industry can do? It's _pathetic_. Keep all the cheesy misfeatures but make it cost _less_ than the iMac thank you, otherwise it's a sick joke. I can't believe that you end up getting more linux for your money from _Apple_ hardware, it's just ludicrous. That certainly is not why _I_ use Apple hardware, and I'm not wealthy. What is going on, when in a particular definable category of computing (goofy industrial designs ;) ) the PC versions are completely inferior in, of all things, price/performance? And have just as much proprietary junk as Apple always had? Is this going to continue and become true for more mainstream computers, too?
You don't like sick humor? ;) or IT whores?
"You can modify any page here, and add your questions, answers, and examples of Squeak code". Eeep! We are talking ITS (Incompatible Timesharing System) out there and alive on the Web! How is it that nobody noticed this happening?
Just looked at the whole main front page. Damn if it isn't the simple truth! Forget 'weblogs', that's tame and tiresome- 'Swikis' are clearly the novel concept. Yes, there are old versions, yes it can be reverted (with a certain amount of tedious cut+paste) from backups in the case of wilful destruction, but by God if it isn't ITS (intentional total lack of) security all over again, with the same social contract and extended trust. I could have tweeked out the HTML all I wanted- that's what it's about. So could you. Of course I didn't- I don't know enough about Squeak to contribute- yet. I hope people get the same shock of recognition that I had, and realize, 'Damn- this _is_ my page! They don't even know who I am but I get to edit the HTML of it anyhow.' I hope whatever slashdotters are slashdotting all these sites (one was already tottering under the load) can understand the freedom of this. It's like the freedom of linux coding only applied to a shared web space. I think this is wonderful. I had no idea anyone was doing anything this daring, this cool.
You're not alone: I get precisely the same sense. I wonder who, out there, has read the reviews in the Interface Hall of Shame? How many developers are wittingly or unwittingly cloning Windows desktop behaviors (not to mention stuff like Explorer! ack!) without questioning whether this is really an effective approach? I think that needs to be questioned. I think (and this is a mac dude saying this) desktops need to be questioned, the whole Mac legacy needs to be questioned. If people want that, they know where to go. What else might be possible?
I have to wholeheartedly agree here. DFL spent 4 years with W95/NT: I've spent comparable time with various MacOSes. Apart from basic file management duties (which I don't see _any_ Linux desktop doing properly, and indeed don't see Windows doing properly either) I don't see what the point is to having a desktop _at_ _all_.
Look, this was neat stuff ten years ago- but just because it's only coming around to Linux in recent years doesn't mean it's _that_ great an idea. It's nothing more than a visual orientation tool, and this is only a reminder of the _real_ state of the filesystem, an imaginary picture and not the true status of the computer. The positions icons are in do not 'exist' in any relevant sense, to the computer. They are arbitrary.
Drag and drop is great- hell, I very often use my MacOS partitions and extensively use drag and drop, and it's totally prevalent in MacOS and works quite consistently- but there are only so many ways I use it, in the long run, and all of these ways could be implemented some other way. Selection in X is so screwy it's a moot point that it isn't drag and drop- and the other use I find is dragging selected text (always text) to the desktop and making a clipping. There are other ways I could get that result, because all it really is, is copying the active selection to a file- that's ALL it is, it's just done with a motion rather than a command.
I have linuxPPC running with a medium-old Window Maker and am well pleased with it, and run nothing resembling a 'desktop'. That's what multiple terms and the applications menu are for, and the latter allows tricks I couldn't begin to do from a 'desktop' with limited action grammar (I'd have to make special aliases to script the running of special other programs in combination- yuck! Not appropriate for use with MacOS).
I have linux (RH 5.1, heavily stripped) running on a _486_ at work with 16M of ram and a mere 240M hard drive, and _that_ runs an old Window Maker and is quite happy with it (and also runs aterms- with the option of making them transparent. Yah- transparent terms on a 486. Very nice way to run console apps on severely limited systems- it's not all that slow, even)
I agree with DFL: I see _no_ significant benefit to a linux 'desktop'. Why, why? I suppose I can see putting icons on the screen, but you don't _have_ to... and anyhow WM offers dock and clip and stuff to let icons be present. I've found, personally, after many years of using a very determined desktop environment, that I find it soothing and kind of Zen to have an empty space where the desktop would be- or a nice picture uncluttered by objects (save the clip- or even sans both dock and clip), or an Afterstep-inspired animated xlockmore background, like star -batchcount 200 -size 20 -trek 0 -straight (or laser, if I want to be veryveryalertandawake!)
Maybe it is simply that people who have used Mac or Windows for years and become very familiar with desktops are more open to looking at other approaches and thinking they are _better_ than what (to the old Windows or Mac user) seems like the old-fashioned way of doing things? When using Linux, I find that the idea of a desktop with icons to launch programs and menubars/taskbars on the screen etc etc etc seems intolerably limiting and trite... I guess it takes all kinds... how many other Mac/Windows users actively try to set up Linux so it behaves different from anything they are familiar with?
That is an assumption.
If his job is that bad...
If his boss is devising new ways to make it even worse just to keep him from going near _you_ and your oasis...
If his boss is working out contracts removing more and more of his rights and turning him into property rather than an employee...
MAYBE HE BETTER FSCKING QUIT HIS JOB.
Be more ruthless, people. Sympathy is earned, not to be taken for granted. If you see slaves, do you feed 'em and save their owner the expense of feeding their property, give them water saving their owner the expense of bothering to find water for them, do you take over all the responsibilities of the owner without asking for the injustice of their situation to be changed- or do you save your efforts for the ones trying to break free?
You can't. This is a suicidal strategy. :)
You can't make sure anything runs better on Windows, because you do not own it. You can't count on reverse engineering, because legislation is being forced through to make that a crime. You can't significantly help free software by establishing beachheads of it on MacOS and Windows, because it is a luxury on those platforms, easily outmaneuvered in flash and glitz by proprietary vendors, and it cannot be certain the APIs it relies on are the true APIs- the vendor can change the rules of the game at any time.
Hell, I _program_ GPLed free software on MacOS, and I don't think this is a sane strategy. I program that way because I _use_ MacOS and because I want there to be GPLed software there, not because I have any illusion that this will cause Mac market share to be lost to Linux because I'm putting GPLed stuff there. It is not- the stuff that I write can only _increase_ the market share of MacOS. I'm OK with this, it could do with a bit of increasing and is a nice weird option to have around the industry, plus easy to maintain
If you want to get market share for Linux then present people with no option- the arrogance of commercial software will do the rest.
The one thing you can be pretty certain of is that Unix perl scripts running on Unix hosts are pretty well immune. The source to it is available, and it's not subject to being seized or perverted. :)
What MS will be doing if they want to play hardball is this: breaking Unix perl scripts for THEIR OWN PEOPLE. Making little changes so only MS-Perl runs properly, and scripts from the archives or scripts from Unix that shouldn't be causing problems, would cause problems or fail. I don't know exactly how this would be done- it'd be syntactic- but this is definitely what would be happening.
Again: they would break it FOR THEIR OWN PEOPLE, w.r.t running scripts from the Unix community. This is a dangerous tactic because if they do it too much (combined with all the lovely license and 'user protection' schemes they're into), the temptation will simply be to abandon ship entirely. However, that is a risk they have to take because their only real option is to poison their own well- to make MS-Perl begin to act incompatibly and hope they can load so many examples into it that people will still choose that fork- this in spite of the fact that someone could try to make another Win32 Perl to compete with MS-Perl (at least until legislation is passed that is draconian enough about reverse engineering to make this awkward to impossible- in that case they would change Win32 just a bit and not update the docs and then the choices (for that API) become 'fail' or 'break the law')
Expect MS Perl to not run *nix perl scripts forever- however, the example given ('my perl script running on a *nix server') _would_ be safe as the script only has to run on *nix, and the Win32 browser does not have to run it.
Perhaps they will build it into IE and attempt to get people to make MS-Perl scripts that run on the client, not the server. After all, IIS seems not to be the most effective way of producing dynamic content anyhow, and offloading that dreadful processing load could be a real win
Very 1984-esque. As the phrase goes, 'may you live in interesting times'. This is the digital equivalent of the period just before the American Revolution, FWIW.
I have to sympathize with the people who argue, 'no! Don't let this pass, it will do immeasurable damage even if it _does_ force the issue of free software and make it almost unavoidable'. I sympathize a great deal, because it is deeply disturbing to watch an industry develop a choke-hold over technology, government- anytime an entity is legally allowed to hold _sole_ discretion over the survival of another entity, be that a company or a person's records or, hell, a government's records... then you have real trouble. Power corrupts, and that is more power than most people would know what to do with- especially when we're talking about the privilege to on the one hand define an industry standard operating system (yah, 'doze...) and then withhold it at whim regardless of damages. That's _damned_ scary.
And yet, I am not convinced 'we the people' have the power to reform this in time. I believe this or something like it will go through- and our humanitarian concerns (wishing business, government not to be subject to a reign of terror) will not save the intended victims of this ghastly power-seize. I think it will go through, and our world will quietly change into an Orwellian nightmare around us- with respect to proprietary software. And there will be no ground to give and no chance of negotiation- the only choices will be to submit or to _fully_ go for free software and disclaim even the idea of interoperability with the proprietary stuff- it simply will not be in the interests of proprietary software to pretend anymore.
Where this might get very ugly is protocols and networking. It won't kill anyone if computer joysticks or certain printers can't be used with open source products- this already occurs. However, attacking the networked infrastructure of the world would be deadly, and it's hard to imagine anything more important than defending the ability of the world to communicate- we cannot balkanize, we can't afford another Dark Ages, we must protect the ability of people everywhere to network with each other and exchange ideas, viewpoints, dialogue. This was important even when the danger was only proprietary stuff crowding out the older stuff and refusing to interoperate- how much more dangerous when the proprietary stuff is to be operated only by the graces of a centralised authority? This would be Jon Postel's worst nightmare, perhaps beyond his imagining.
We are looking at war.
Whether or not it turns out as bad as it might, it's best to remain firmly aware that we are looking at the prospects of literal war over these issues. There are too many parallels with civil liberties issues- first trespass into people's software 'homes', then negligence and the refusal to take responsibility for damages to said property, and now it's to be legal for companies to destroy my data or seize it without due process on _their_ notion that I did something wrong? Does this begin to sound eerily familiar to those who have learned anything about the American Revolution?
We _are_ looking at war, and we are probably stuck with it.
For me, well: I can't be terribly impressed with some of the scuzball freedomfighters, any more than the colonists were an impressive aristocratic lot. Seems like there are a lot of script kiddies in the ranks- that ego runs riot, mine included- that politicking is rampant, the whole troupe seems like either blowhards or rugrats up against trained troops with big budgets.
Yet I know damned well which side I'm on- there's no possible compromise, and my mood is more and more like the Boston hotheads causing trouble for the colonies in 1776. It's the grand imposing impressiveness of a small, mange-ridden cornered rat- and the same desperation, born of the total lack of other options.
I'm posting this from a small town in Vermont, in the United States of America, and will soon be visiting my family in Lexington- where the Redcoats marched, shed Colonist blood, and were cut down themselves in the start of the war for independence.
WE WON, DAMN IT. Remember that when this nightmarish cybertyranny madness gets oppressive. Supposing the laws are passed and working on reverse-engineered projects becomes ten years and $100,000 minimum, supposing this is quickly taken advantage of to render everything that seemed to be good strategy (Samba, windows-like interfaces, ability to talk to NT Server...) useless. Guess what? That's war for you. If you don't like it, you can knuckle under and bootlick, or you can fight back using any means at your disposal. The outcome is not pre-ordained- and there comes a point where fear, uncertainty and doubt no longer matter because there is no longer an option to bootlick. With this legislation and what it represents, I see that point approaching, and I choose to call it war, just as much a war as any physical war.
*ROFL* :) :) one might almost say that in order for programming to be geeking, the results have to not have any comments _and_ not compile :)
No, I don't think so... but then, you weren't to know that 'geeking' already has a meaning. Geeking is what a crack head does when they can't get their crack- sort of vibrating and sweating and going insane and paranoid and out of control
Therefore, Windows geeking is not surprising, but making a filter for the GIMP would hardly qualify- at least not if the filter is to be any good
"When I first got my new Linux box up and running - it isn't any more"
Why?
'Tain't really code per se. It's more or less just what Red Hat does, only with a very different 'style'. It's just a Window Maker-managed Linux with pretty much all the GUI config tools taken out (no tcl/tk, no gtk) and a fair amount of console stuff. pico and pilot are added to help deal with the initial learning curve, and I've included _lots_ of hitherto unseen textures for backgrounds and all my linux graphics and desktops- I need to clear the lots-of-textures as they are 'harvested' from another program's output. I may or may not come up with cool scripts, but I am in the process of taking basically the package list from the install and _annotating_ it- should prove to be interesting reading, and contains _lots_ of critical information, such as information about how, when you run 'at' and drop into the subshell, in order to finish and return to the interactive shell, you _must_ type control-D in order to close the subshell- nothing else will help- plus fun stuff like a review of bc leading the hapless newbie through 256+256, then 256*256, then 256^256 (whereupon newbie boggles and jaw drops), then for fun it's suggested to try 1024^1024 :) :)
Well, anyway- maybe that bit will be the most useful one! DOCUMENTATION! It's from a relentlessly text-oriented viewpoint, but this is all stuff pretty much everybody has, just maybe isn't using- and that's just not right. Though some of it, well... I have to admit I get a bit satirical about stuff like awk
This has not historically worked.
Period.
If your argument is that it does work, I would ask, what changed?