Research people were just short-sighted. Obviously, Apple's existing products were not suitable for corporation, but nobody can say that they couldn't possibly develop any new product that would take off. And at that time, if you wanted to do the coolest stuff, you had to do it on expensive workstations first and then trickle down to consumer market as hardware became cheaper.
After Steve Jobs left Apple, he started NeXT which was obviously oriented towards both big and small business. In the meantime Apple stagnated and didn't revive until he came back and ported NeXTStep to Mac hardware.
If he wasn't kicked out from Apple, NeXT would no doubt have Mac application compatibility. Then Apple would be the only company with UNIX workstations that also run all popular personal computer apps. Sun and Microsoft would be in deep trouble. And by '95, Apple would run NextStep on consumer Macs and Microsoft wouldn't have any product with unique advantages to grab 90%+ market share.
It would be reasonable to disclose that the meeting took place, but probably not the contents. If a politician initially considers to do something illegal or stupid due to his ignorance of the subject during the meeting and then educates himself and makes a good decision, he deserves more credit, not less for actually caring about doing his job. Yet, it would be extensively used in smear campaigns during elections.
It's only bribery if someone promises campaign donations in exchange for a decision. Otherwise it's just infomercials. And we can not get rid of it right away, because otherwise politicians have no way to get educated on every issue they vote on or know which ones are controversial enough to research deeper. Would you be able to make an informed decision on which brand of tractors government should buy? Then don't expect a farmer to understand the difference between Linux and Windows. He will just pick whatever his grandson runs if nobody gives him a good reason to choose otherwise.
no respect for birth control (which China has done right)
I am really shocked at this line of thinking. Forced abortions/sterilization is "birth control done right"? How would you like for someone to cut open your belly just because you act like a normal human?
There will be a gotcha planted in there somewhere, what remains to be seen is whether it can be worked around or not. I'm betting it can.
and then in the signature
If you know anything about Lotus file formats, please click my homepage link. If you can't contribute, please vote.
Dude, if you don't trust something licensed voluntarily and for free, how come you want people to reverse engineer file formats? Don't you think a company is more likely to sue if it didn't volunteer the information?
No, no, it's not "Shroud of Turin versus Science" - religion and science finally came together. Scientists finally proved that Jesus was a finite state machine that left behind a shroud on which it was writing images! And according to carbon dating, the finite machine involved was non-deterministic, so they can't tell when it reached the final state.
What do you do when your software has all the features the end-user needs, and works well enough for most people?
Anything but screw that up! They have a large mindshare. Now they can offer their own financial services and people will choose them just because they work really well with quicken. For example, they can offer Internet-based consulting where someone reviews your records and suggest how you can save money without sacrificing your lifestyle. This kind of things can bring way more revenue than software.
They should already get some small fee from banks that use their networks. But if they had to offer that for free or unreasonably cheap to "get in", there will be plenty of other opportunities in future.
I am not clicking links that show something open in.se domain!
Re:Here's why I love it:Gravity isn't just for pla
on
Why I Love The GPL
·
· Score: 1
One can make the long-term argument that just as all businesses eventually gravitate towards a monopoly. All payware eventually gravitates towards DRM.
Yes, there was a time when grocery stores routinely sold out of date products and misrepresented the contents on the label. Then we passed some food safety laws, and now they don't. There will be always companies scumming customers or having unwanted social effects. We just have to push back through laws and consumer education. But it's not inherently wrong for me to make something and sell it to other people:-)
I have a powerbook (duh, see sig) and whilst OS X is pretty tolerable the thing that makes it useless to me is the fact that you have to buy every little damn thing for it. $20 for focus follows mouse, $15 for a decent trackpd driver, $10 for that, $25 for something else. It's a never ending trail of money.
Don't you go to grocery store every week and buy tomatoes, eggs, cereal for total price of several software utilities you mentioned? Then what is exactly is your problem with buying software? Eventually you will get everything you reasonably need and will not even have to re-buy them every week.
Let's say Apple opens iMac Software Store that solves all the inconvenience you complain about. You can browse hundreds of programs - games, apps, system tools - and install 30 day evaluation copies. Then if you like a program, you have one-click option in its menu to purchase it and burn a DRM-free installation CD if you want a backup. Will you still complain?
Of course one problem is that US software prices are too high for 3rd world and often US users. Well, the solution here is to buy from your neighborhood startup rather than Microsoft.
I write GPLed software for OSX and so do many other people. Just browse VersionTracker. But I don't understand your fundamental objection to ever paying for software - even if you can afford it and it doesn't have any obnoxious DRM.
If you listen to their PR people they claim that "the whole Linux thing" "wouldn't have happened" if they'd open soured Solaris ten years ago
Well, if they open sourced x86 Solaris before Linux was written and it was usable on Linus'es x86 box, he sure wouldn't have written another kernel. His original motivation was that Minix sucked and Andy Tanenbaum didn't want to do anything about that. If his OS didn't suck, he would just work on some other projects. Did you see him re-write compiler, editor or a UNIX shell when there were usable existing GNU tools?
Legitimate patent licensing for non-free software doesn't cripple the product unless it's trying to just rip off other people's work without adding extra value. Office supplies companies don't buy patent insurance - they just pay 3 cents a piece for items they ship. If royalties are too steep, there is an option to ask government for compulsory licensing. That is rarely used, but patent owners know it's there and generally negotiate based on value of their invention.
Instead of wasting money on insurance, concerned companies should pool funds for lobbying to reform patent and civil litigation laws.
Surely if people have 100% responsibility for their actions, they should also have a 100% freedom to do whatever they choose to make themselves happy and avoid pressure to commit crime. Certainly bad family and school is a big source of bad influence, smoking pot can release stress and paid sex could prevent rape. Would you really allow a 12 year old boy to move to neighbor's house (say, in exchange for doing some chores), quit school, hire a prostitute and smoke a joint? If not, it's not fair to require children (or even US adults) to be fully responsible for themselves. You decide something for another human, you take partial responsibility for his/her actions.
Easy. He is saying he uses C, Java, PHP and C++ more than anything else, but it takes at least six languages to get to more than 50% of his programming. Also he doesn't use any other language exactly as often as one of the first four.
Don't steal copyrighted music, don't get sued into oblivion.
He didn't steal anything, he just pointed out where other people are infringing copyright. The music industry should get their fine in the form of information on how to get a photocopy of $15,900.
I don't have a problem with these two examples. Java virtualmachine is a giveaway authors thought of it as an emulator for some hardware that runs bytecode.
Of course, nowadays many programs are developed directly using lesstif with little thought that people might use OSF Motif to run them. In this case, Lesstif would be a native platform. As would Wine, if someone just knows Win32 API and thinks of it as an easiest way to write a Linux program.
Government's don't own the planet or represent the people. They are simply gangs who ended up with the biggest guns in a given place and have taken control. Most of the time, it's worth putting up with them and paying half of your income as protection money, because you don't want to use a gun yourself and most of the time they will fight off smaller gangs for you. But what they don't deserve is respect. People deserve respect. If you are at a friends house and she doesn't want to see you browsing porno, by all means stop. But what you are looking at in your own room, behind closed door, is noone's business. If some thugs with guns want to control you to assert their dominance and you can trick them, force the to give up, or find a place with a bit nicer thugs, all the more power to you.
Oh, and democracy doesn't really represent people, because hundreds of millions can not be expected to immediately understand a new idea. Now if I could get together with a bunch of friends and decide to live in a certain way and then whoever liked it could join and live by different rules than Republicrats, it would be real representation.
Only if it lets people run Linux Gnome executables without recompiling them. API support == source compatibility, emulation == binary compatibility. It doesn't have to be CPUs - there are math coprocessor emulators, OS emulators and copy-protection emulators.
I thought IE installing ActiveX controls was the plugin design flaw. You are supposed to just download a file and have a chance to think before running it.
Win32 API is just one more option to write a program under Linux, no different from Motif, Qt or Java. There maybe a better choice for a new project, but if a large existing program already works well under Wine, there is no reason to change it, or even not to also release future versions that way indefinitely. Lotus notes it's there own software, I am sure they can make small fixes for compatibility problems.
In the process of earning his money, Gates' licensing DOS and it's descendants to all comers created a standard hardware platform for personal computers, thereby forcing hardware vendors to compete on price and innovation.
The reason IBM-compatible PCs really took off is that the original one was made from off-the-shelf parts and small companies could build their own without a chip manufacturing facility. In the other words, because a monopoly made a mistake that allowed small companies to compete.
The OS wasn't very important that days, on computers with 16K of RAM. A lot of games and I would imagine other programs were self-booting and didn't require an OS at all. Still Microsoft played a part in progress by reselling one they bought for $50K to IBM.
But that was way before Bill Gates made $40B, $750M or probably $1M. And ever since then his company was a hindrance to progress. By the time people upgraded their PCs to $640K of RAM, it was possible and desirable to run an OS with a graphical UI and task switching. If Microsoft licensed something like GEM and distributed it with every copy of DOS back then, PCs would become useful for business and personal productivity applications much earlier than they did. But they just stuck with what they had on a 16K RAM machine. It was perhaps not a monopoly power yet, just laziness characteristic of a company that to this days is trying to milk the most money out of poorly written software that happens to come with every IBM-compatible PC. And things just went downhill from then.
I think Bill Gates and most other very rich people were initially productive by being catalysts of progress made in some area. But since then, most have become a hindrance to what they themselves started by keeping others from contributing and diverting money that could be used more productively by society. Really toothy anti-trust laws, punitive taxes for getting insane amounts of money in a short time and other measures would be a big help.
Since primitive machines were invented, they always had a nasty habit of choosing A, B, human instead of A,B,C. I guess you didn't give much thought to human fingers in hot dogs or robotics-related industrial accidents in Japan.
The problem is precisely the lack of free will and independent thinking. A machine has grappling hooks, vacuum suction or serving belt, but it can not make value judgment on what/whom it is throwing into molten metal.
As the AI develops, the problem will get worse before it gets better. A robot working in slaughterhouse might have the ability to chase a running mammal and cut it's throat, but not to ascertain exact species. Imagine a beowulf cluster of those on the run in New York subway. Workspace and consumer safety legislation would be very much in order at that point.
You argument may be valid for Kazaa and friends, but BitTorrent is used legally quite often. It provides a unique feature - bandwidth sharing - while classic P2P mostly helps you hide from accountability because your machine is only visible by a few peers.
In addition, BT is inconvinient for illegal use, because URL of the tracker is exposed and you know exactly who shared the file and how to take it down.
Easy - if someone goes to the past and tries to make some weird changes, like becoming his own father, they can always send someone else to stop him before he enters time machine. They did come back, they were just stopped by timecops:-)
For a while now, Sun has been pushing Java platform that would allow all applications written by Sun to run on IBM hardware and under WebSphere if the customer so chooses. It's quite reasonable for them to ask IBM to compete on advantages of each product rather than trying to pull a Microsoft and lock-in users into unwanted components.
Besides, there must be lots of existing Rational customers running, say, clearcase servers on Solaris. It's not really fair for IBM to force them to buy new hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Research people were just short-sighted. Obviously, Apple's existing products were not suitable for corporation, but nobody can say that they couldn't possibly develop any new product that would take off. And at that time, if you wanted to do the coolest stuff, you had to do it on expensive workstations first and then trickle down to consumer market as hardware became cheaper.
After Steve Jobs left Apple, he started NeXT which was obviously oriented towards both big and small business. In the meantime Apple stagnated and didn't revive until he came back and ported NeXTStep to Mac hardware.
If he wasn't kicked out from Apple, NeXT would no doubt have Mac application compatibility. Then Apple would be the only company with UNIX workstations that also run all popular personal computer apps. Sun and Microsoft would be in deep trouble. And by '95, Apple would run NextStep on consumer Macs and Microsoft wouldn't have any product with unique advantages to grab 90%+ market share.
It would be reasonable to disclose that the meeting took place, but probably not the contents. If a politician initially considers to do something illegal or stupid due to his ignorance of the subject during the meeting and then educates himself and makes a good decision, he deserves more credit, not less for actually caring about doing his job. Yet, it would be extensively used in smear campaigns during elections.
It's only bribery if someone promises campaign donations in exchange for a decision. Otherwise it's just infomercials. And we can not get rid of it right away, because otherwise politicians have no way to get educated on every issue they vote on or know which ones are controversial enough to research deeper. Would you be able to make an informed decision on which brand of tractors government should buy? Then don't expect a farmer to understand the difference between Linux and Windows. He will just pick whatever his grandson runs if nobody gives him a good reason to choose otherwise.
no respect for birth control (which China has done right)
I am really shocked at this line of thinking. Forced abortions/sterilization is "birth control done right"? How would you like for someone to cut open your belly just because you act like a normal human?
There will be a gotcha planted in there somewhere, what remains to be seen is whether it can be worked around or not. I'm betting it can.
and then in the signature
If you know anything about Lotus file formats, please click my homepage link. If you can't contribute, please vote.
Dude, if you don't trust something licensed voluntarily and for free, how come you want people to reverse engineer file formats? Don't you think a company is more likely to sue if it didn't volunteer the information?
No, no, it's not "Shroud of Turin versus Science" - religion and science finally came together. Scientists finally proved that Jesus was a finite state machine that left behind a shroud on which it was writing images! And according to carbon dating, the finite machine involved was non-deterministic, so they can't tell when it reached the final state.
I for one welcome our turing overlords!
What do you do when your software has all the features the end-user needs, and works well enough for most people?
Anything but screw that up! They have a large mindshare. Now they can offer their own financial services and people will choose them just because they work really well with quicken. For example, they can offer Internet-based consulting where someone reviews your records and suggest how you can save money without sacrificing your lifestyle. This kind of things can bring way more revenue than software.
They should already get some small fee from banks that use their networks. But if they had to offer that for free or unreasonably cheap to "get in", there will be plenty of other opportunities in future.
openstep.se
.se domain!
I am not clicking links that show something open in
One can make the long-term argument that just as all businesses eventually gravitate towards a monopoly. All payware eventually gravitates towards DRM.
:-)
Yes, there was a time when grocery stores routinely sold out of date products and misrepresented the contents on the label. Then we passed some food safety laws, and now they don't. There will be always companies scumming customers or having unwanted social effects. We just have to push back through laws and consumer education. But it's not inherently wrong for me to make something and sell it to other people
I have a powerbook (duh, see sig) and whilst OS X is pretty tolerable the thing that makes it useless to me is the fact that you have to buy every little damn thing for it. $20 for focus follows mouse, $15 for a decent trackpd driver, $10 for that, $25 for something else. It's a never ending trail of money.
Don't you go to grocery store every week and buy tomatoes, eggs, cereal for total price of several software utilities you mentioned? Then what is exactly is your problem with buying software? Eventually you will get everything you reasonably need and will not even have to re-buy them every week.
Let's say Apple opens iMac Software Store that solves all the inconvenience you complain about. You can browse hundreds of programs - games, apps, system tools - and install 30 day evaluation copies. Then if you like a program, you have one-click option in its menu to purchase it and burn a DRM-free installation CD if you want a backup. Will you still complain?
Of course one problem is that US software prices are too high for 3rd world and often US users. Well, the solution here is to buy from your neighborhood startup rather than Microsoft.
I write GPLed software for OSX and so do many other people. Just browse VersionTracker. But I don't understand your fundamental objection to ever paying for software - even if you can afford it and it doesn't have any obnoxious DRM.
If you listen to their PR people they claim that "the whole Linux thing" "wouldn't have happened" if they'd open soured Solaris ten years ago
Well, if they open sourced x86 Solaris before Linux was written and it was usable on Linus'es x86 box, he sure wouldn't have written another kernel. His original motivation was that Minix sucked and Andy Tanenbaum didn't want to do anything about that. If his OS didn't suck, he would just work on some other projects. Did you see him re-write compiler, editor or a UNIX shell when there were usable existing GNU tools?
Legitimate patent licensing for non-free software doesn't cripple the product unless it's trying to just rip off other people's work without adding extra value. Office supplies companies don't buy patent insurance - they just pay 3 cents a piece for items they ship. If royalties are too steep, there is an option to ask government for compulsory licensing. That is rarely used, but patent owners know it's there and generally negotiate based on value of their invention.
Instead of wasting money on insurance, concerned companies should pool funds for lobbying to reform patent and civil litigation laws.
Surely if people have 100% responsibility for their actions, they should also have a 100% freedom to do whatever they choose to make themselves happy and avoid pressure to commit crime. Certainly bad family and school is a big source of bad influence, smoking pot can release stress and paid sex could prevent rape. Would you really allow a 12 year old boy to move to neighbor's house (say, in exchange for doing some chores), quit school, hire a prostitute and smoke a joint? If not, it's not fair to require children (or even US adults) to be fully responsible for themselves. You decide something for another human, you take partial responsibility for his/her actions.
Easy. He is saying he uses C, Java, PHP and C++ more than anything else, but it takes at least six languages to get to more than 50% of his programming. Also he doesn't use any other language exactly as often as one of the first four.
Don't steal copyrighted music, don't get sued into oblivion.
He didn't steal anything, he just pointed out where other people are infringing copyright. The music industry should get their fine in the form of information on how to get a photocopy of $15,900.
I don't have a problem with these two examples. Java virtual machine is a giveaway authors thought of it as an emulator for some hardware that runs bytecode.
Of course, nowadays many programs are developed directly using lesstif with little thought that people might use OSF Motif to run them. In this case, Lesstif would be a native platform. As would Wine, if someone just knows Win32 API and thinks of it as an easiest way to write a Linux program.
Government's don't own the planet or represent the people. They are simply gangs who ended up with the biggest guns in a given place and have taken control. Most of the time, it's worth putting up with them and paying half of your income as protection money, because you don't want to use a gun yourself and most of the time they will fight off smaller gangs for you. But what they don't deserve is respect. People deserve respect. If you are at a friends house and she doesn't want to see you browsing porno, by all means stop. But what you are looking at in your own room, behind closed door, is noone's business. If some thugs with guns want to control you to assert their dominance and you can trick them, force the to give up, or find a place with a bit nicer thugs, all the more power to you.
Oh, and democracy doesn't really represent people, because hundreds of millions can not be expected to immediately understand a new idea. Now if I could get together with a bunch of friends and decide to live in a certain way and then whoever liked it could join and live by different rules than Republicrats, it would be real representation.
Only if it lets people run Linux Gnome executables without recompiling them. API support == source compatibility, emulation == binary compatibility. It doesn't have to be CPUs - there are math coprocessor emulators, OS emulators and copy-protection emulators.
IE can't install ActiveX controls (IE plugin design flaw...
I thought IE installing ActiveX controls was the plugin design flaw. You are supposed to just download a file and have a chance to think before running it.
Win32 API is just one more option to write a program under Linux, no different from Motif, Qt or Java. There maybe a better choice for a new project, but if a large existing program already works well under Wine, there is no reason to change it, or even not to also release future versions that way indefinitely. Lotus notes it's there own software, I am sure they can make small fixes for compatibility problems.
In the process of earning his money, Gates' licensing DOS and it's descendants to all comers created a standard hardware platform for personal computers, thereby forcing hardware vendors to compete on price and innovation.
The reason IBM-compatible PCs really took off is that the original one was made from off-the-shelf parts and small companies could build their own without a chip manufacturing facility. In the other words, because a monopoly made a mistake that allowed small companies to compete.
The OS wasn't very important that days, on computers with 16K of RAM. A lot of games and I would imagine other programs were self-booting and didn't require an OS at all. Still Microsoft played a part in progress by reselling one they bought for $50K to IBM.
But that was way before Bill Gates made $40B, $750M or probably $1M. And ever since then his company was a hindrance to progress. By the time people upgraded their PCs to $640K of RAM, it was possible and desirable to run an OS with a graphical UI and task switching. If Microsoft licensed something like GEM and distributed it with every copy of DOS back then, PCs would become useful for business and personal productivity applications much earlier than they did. But they just stuck with what they had on a 16K RAM machine. It was perhaps not a monopoly power yet, just laziness characteristic of a company that to this days is trying to milk the most money out of poorly written software that happens to come with every IBM-compatible PC. And things just went downhill from then.
I think Bill Gates and most other very rich people were initially productive by being catalysts of progress made in some area. But since then, most have become a hindrance to what they themselves started by keeping others from contributing and diverting money that could be used more productively by society. Really toothy anti-trust laws, punitive taxes for getting insane amounts of money in a short time and other measures would be a big help.
Since primitive machines were invented, they always had a nasty habit of choosing A, B, human instead of A,B,C. I guess you didn't give much thought to human fingers in hot dogs or robotics-related industrial accidents in Japan.
The problem is precisely the lack of free will and independent thinking. A machine has grappling hooks, vacuum suction or serving belt, but it can not make value judgment on what/whom it is throwing into molten metal.
As the AI develops, the problem will get worse before it gets better. A robot working in slaughterhouse might have the ability to chase a running mammal and cut it's throat, but not to ascertain exact species. Imagine a beowulf cluster of those on the run in New York subway. Workspace and consumer safety legislation would be very much in order at that point.
You argument may be valid for Kazaa and friends, but BitTorrent is used legally quite often. It provides a unique feature - bandwidth sharing - while classic P2P mostly helps you hide from accountability because your machine is only visible by a few peers.
In addition, BT is inconvinient for illegal use, because URL of the tracker is exposed and you know exactly who shared the file and how to take it down.
Easy - if someone goes to the past and tries to make some weird changes, like becoming his own father, they can always send someone else to stop him before he enters time machine. They did come back, they were just stopped by timecops :-)
Kettle, meet Pot.
For a while now, Sun has been pushing Java platform that would allow all applications written by Sun to run on IBM hardware and under WebSphere if the customer so chooses. It's quite reasonable for them to ask IBM to compete on advantages of each product rather than trying to pull a Microsoft and lock-in users into unwanted components.
Besides, there must be lots of existing Rational customers running, say, clearcase servers on Solaris. It's not really fair for IBM to force them to buy new hardware.