I'd step over *you* laying unconscious in the gutter. Probably give some kicks while I'm at it.
If you've been indoors playing your Nintendo for too long, you might want to splatter some sun-block onto your pasty white skin and check for atrophy in your leg muscles before venturing outdoors on the streets...
Yes, but with respect, you're still making this out to be a Linux vs Microsoft war where such is not the case.
Sure, MS are spreading FUD about Linux, they're waging their own little war but it isn't the same from the Linux side of things.
Apart from a few zealots, the Linux community is just trying to get a message out, namely "Linux is free, it's an alternative, give it a try" and defneding itself when MS blatanatly lies when making comparisons.
Who cares what software people use as long as it's right for them and that they have been given the correct information to make informed decisions about security, stability, DRM, etc?
Just about everything in your bigotted argument is wrong:
it's a shame that ever effort made to merge the ditros together fails miserably.
There has never been any effort to merge the distros together. There has been an effort by United Linux to introduce a standard way of doing things such as the layout of the filesystem, device naming, etc.
However, the reason to have different Linux distros is due to the requirements for which it is used - embedded systems, secure servers, desktop use, etc.
For precisely the same reasons you should be criticising Microsoft for producing Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional, etc.
this is the reason why microsoft will win
Erm, precisely what will Microsoft win? It's already got 95% of the desktop share and most of the corporate share. Yet Linux is being used more and more.
So what determines Microsoft has won??? The Linux community doesn't care, we're just here using it and enjoying it.
My niece, for example, happily uses Windows to do her homework on, play games and surf the Internet. Just because me, her uncle, prefers Linux does not mean I'm going to erase her Windows install and put Red Hat on? The fact is, she uses what she likes to use, I use what I like to use, end of story.
Linux will die out.
How do you work that one out??? It's already embedded in more devices than you could possibly be aware of, Open Source apps like Apache and Sendmail are the core Internet applications and the whole UNIX philosophy started a whole 10 years before Gates even thought of MS-DOS!!!
the community needs to get it's shit together and fast.
Sorry, which community? The Open Source and GNU have been creating and distributing free software for nigh on 20 years now, the Firefox browser is stealing users away from Internet Explorer, third world countries can't get enough of OpenOffice...
Sounds like a community that's got it's "shit" labelled, weighed, measured and filed away in neat cabinets if you ask me!
You need to go off and try Linux yourself, then hate it! At least then your opinion will be valid...
Or are we stuck with the x86 architecture until 2020?
We sure are - Microsoft have enough trouble developing bloated, unstable & insecure applications for one processor architecture, they sure don't want to develop for any others...
I'm no supporter of piracy believe me but Nintendo is just another mega-corporation whose only function in life is to milk the rest of us for as much money as possible so that a few fat cats at the top get rich.
If you're that much in love with a corporation that you have to spend time in your life to do their policing for them, then you probably need to go get a few extra hobbies.
I just wonder how many of these Nintendo "fanboys" would report someone selling a few pirated games but step over someone lying unconscious in the gutter...
There's some truth in what you're saying but I don't accept that it's just OSS admins that have poor people skills - I think it's a trait of many people in support roles, full stop.
My own personal experience now amounts to some 20 years in tech support roles and I simply have no interest in entering management because I enjoy "playing" with the latest hardware and software. However, I don't consider that I'm doing my job correctly unless I am trying to make myself redundant by training others in what I know and passing on the knowledge I have freely. My attitude is that if everyone beneath me knows what I know, that frees me up to go learn about new things and always stay on top of the latest technologies.
Unfortunately, a lot of people I've worked with in the past (and to a degree today) have a "jobsworth" attitude of hoarding information and never passing on what they know purely to protect their own jobs - it doesn't matter whether they support Linux, Windows or anything else...
On top of all this, there has always been a huge chasm that separates tech support people from their managers and the rest of the organisation anyway, particularly sales people. I always take the attitude that I'm supporting our products not our customers because I'm trained in fault-finding hardware and software issues that are not usually specific to a specific customer. Therefore, when a salesman phones me and says "You need to work faster on your Acme Corp. fault because they are about to spend $2 million with us", I usually get very angry with that person because of his/her assumption that the speed and efficiency of my work is based upon what the customer spends with us.
The fact is that being in tech support is never easy - you're always associated with being involved only when things go wrong, you do sometimes deal with dorks who only want to pass a problem on to you without staying involved and learning from your experience and you frequently deal with people who do not understand that sometimes you have to experiment and gather information (all of which is time consuming) when you get a problem nobody's seen before.
Yes, I fantasize a lot about just turning somebody's system off or sticking a screwdriver into the micro-circuitry of their product but the reality of the situation is that I like my job and the fact it pays the mortgage.
The reality of the situation is that many IT managers have now picked up on the "Open Source" buzzwords and do now recognise that certain OSS solutions *might* provide viable alternatives to what they use currently.
However, in my experience, they still have IT people that just know how to maintain Microsoft-based systems and, whilst I've no doubt many of those people know MS products well, they have no interest in trying OSS because it's human nature to stay in the "safe zone" in a safe job rather than risk learning something completely new and not being as good in that new area.
What we therefore have is a "chicken and the egg" situation - IT managers not wanting to invest in training and hardware to deploy OSS solutions that might not give them what they need and IT techies not being able to evaluate OSS solutions properly against their existing solutions.
In the UK (and I guess to a degree in the rest of Europe), I keep hearing about the upsurge in IT spending but I don't see salaries rising from the lows they got down to about 2-3 years ago - in my particular case, not that I'm thinking of changing jobs currently anyway, I work in VoIP & telecomms convergence on mainly Linux-based servers and there is simply *nobody* offering anywhere near the salaries that I am currently getting.
I suspect that the next year or so will see a lot of techies going freelance as contractors in order to get the types of salaries they could have got prior to the slump just after the millennium.
However, as the old saying goes, "you pay peanuts, you get monkeys"!
You are being totally suckered by Microsoft and now is the time to start thinking about what alternative software solutions exist for your enterprise.
No, I am not talking about rolling Linux out on all your corporate desktops and servers overnight - far from it.
However, as every day goes by, you are being dragged deeper and deeper into the Microsoft web without realising it. Attractive licensing deals from MS offer financial discounts to you but in the long term, they lock you more and more into the proprietary world one a single organisation who is just out to do one thing - to make money.
So while you may be spending less money on MS products, just how much money are you now spending on securing mail servers and your intranets from the endless assaults of virii and worms? How much extra have you had to spend on virus checkers in the past year? How many "personal firewalls" have you now deployed over and above the two layer firewalling system that worked perfectly adequately until 18 months ago? How often are you replacing laptops and PCs in your organisation because of the extra demands Microsoft products now make on those machines?
Now Microsoft make this offer of indemnity. What do you think this means to you? What it actually does is drag you in deeper with your Microsoft partnership, you become more dependent on Microsoft, you cannot run your organisation without Microsoft products, Microsoft end up controlling you. In future, it won't matter how insecure or shabby Microsoft products get because you will be so locked into their licensing schemes, you will not be able to escape from them - they become the drug dealer, your corporation becomes the addict.
Think about this now and start to think at other software solutions. Invest some money in looking at alternative ways of doing things in your enterprise - spend some money on a few extra servers, load them with open source alternatives, train some of your IT people to administer them properly, decide for yourself whether open source software is right for your enterprise.
Open source will not give you all you need now - it will do some things better than your existing Microsoft solutions, others it will do worse. However, the open source developers will listen to you if you tell them why you don't like their software and they will try to do something about it if there is a genuine need to make improvements.
But please ACT NOW. Give yourself that lifeline, that "opt-out clause" you create for yourself just in case Microsoft really starts getting heavy on you - believe me, it will happen.
Remember, Microsoft is nothing more than one of your suppliers and should be treated as such - if a supplier lets you down, you start looking at alternative suppliers - the company that provides you with software solutions is no different.
So, spend some money now. Run a few open source servers in parallel to your Microsoft ones, use them, evaluate them, get your users to test them.
But make yourself smarter about the alternatives now before it really is too late for you...
If I can't get indemnification for using open source software then I will be forced to buy only Microsoft products.
I don't understand your logic here unless you are yourself falling hook, line and sinker for Microsoft FUD.
If you use a piece of Open Source software - actually, let's be more specific, GPL software - you get the right to use and modify that code as you wish, as long as your modifications fall under the GPL also.
If those modifications include code that comes under someone else's IP then, yes, you'd probably get sued for it.
However, how can you be sued for just using software that you believe to be under the GPL? If you did not modify that software such that it infringed someone else's IP rights, how can you be liable for it?
I don't understand what indemnification you, the end user, need for using a product you were told does not conflict with someone else's IP?
I don;t see how Linux's file structure is any advantage in this regard.
Purely because of the fact that as a normal non-root user, every file you work on and save is going to be somewhere in your home directory.
Add to this the numerous command-line text search and manipulation tools and you have all you need to search for what you want - sure, it takes time to learn how to hack together reasonably powerful shell scripts but once you know how to do that, nothing else ever works so easily and powerfully.
The fact that Firefox now has an estimated 6% of the browser market is no mean feat and is simply down to the fact that Firefox is a much better, more secure and more regularly updated product than IE.
But the real issue is what Firefox is doing for the Open Source movement as a whole - for the first time, a FOSS application is becoming well-known across the entire PC-owning world and Joe Public is beginning to see that Microsoft is not the only way of doing things any more - all of a sudden, there's a truly free product that beats a commercial one (yes, you still have to buy Windows to use IE).
Sure, those of us in the know already run The GIMP, Open Office, etc. in Windows or in Linux/UNIX but Firefox is the first FOSS product to really get the exposure to the public at large.
The only thing Mozilla needs to do is to continue to keep the core Firefox code as lean and mean as possible and continue to add features through plugins to let useres choose what features they want - after all, most people are used to "skinning" and customising apps these days so let them decide what functionality they do and do not want.
Otherwise, the developers at Mozilla have done and A1 job so far and deserve our heartiest congratulations for a job well done!
...that it is totally impossible for one single company to have such a wide portfolio of products and services that are also going to be recognised by the rest of the world as being reliable and good?
Microsoft have their fingers in just about ever single "software pie" there is currently yet just about everything they make is half-baked, unreliable and full of security holes.
Is it not better to follow the example of Adobe, Symantec, etc. and focus on particular product areas (like graphics and imaging or security) to become specialist and recognised in a much narrower range of products rather than a "jack of all trades but master of none"?
Perhaps if they left search engines to Google and Yahoo, embedded OSes to Palm & Symbian and internet servers to UNIX and Linux, etc., MS wouldn't have the scorn and hatred of just about the entire human race vent on them and would be recognised as product leaders in the desktop OS and office applications arena.
Re:waited in line for 2 1/2 hours and all I got wa
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Thanks for the very reasoned answer.
Yes, none of us are above being milked by the capitalist system, including myself, and like anyone else, I like playing computer games, listening to music from a large CD collection and watching movies at the cineme and on DVD.
What I hate about the system is the fact that we the people have ultimate power of the corporations because we are the consumers and if we all stop consuming, that's it for them.
The fact that people queue for a computer game or queue hours for tickets to a Star Wars movie premier just strikes me as a really sad thing - almost as though the corporations have a captive audience who have no decision making powers of their own.
No product is so important that you must have it - I just wish people would not play into the corporate hands so easily...
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You are a wanker. Expecting Microsoft to hand out food and medication in Iraq is like expecting the U.S. Government to hand out food and medication in the U.S.
I am not expecting Microsoft or any other corrupt corporation to do anything else other than milk the rest of humankind for as much money as possible.
However, I am making an observation that people queuing to be milked of their money is just a little wierd...
What logic.. so by queuing up for a game, we're somehow forcing those other people to queue for food/medicine? Or perhaps we're denying them something? Taking their food right out of their hands, are we?
No. I'm just making an observation about queuing and human dignity, that's all.
"You fucker, people die in automobile wrecks EVERY DAY!"
Sure, and if a few more people cared more about the people around them - didn't drink and drive, didn't drive so fast, didn't suffer from road rage - LESS people would die in automobile accidents.
I'm just putting a perspective on our world, nothing more...
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M$ representatives were there handing out goodies for all us nerds.
Yeah, it'd be nice if they spent a little of that marketing money handing out essentials like food & medication in Iraq, or maybe a little closer to home and hand out some goodies to kids in poor neighbourhoods.
After all, the moment the soldiers move out of Iraq, Microsoft will be straight into Baghdad vulturing for all those big new IT contracts...
Sorry, apologies to vultures - they actually serve a purpose in the scheme of things...
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Don't get me wrong, I'm just as big a geek as anyone else on here, a big fan of Unreal Tournament 2004 & Half-Life - yes, I'm even looking forward to Half-Life 2.
BUT QUEUING UP AT MIDNIGHT FOR A GAME???
Sorry people, but that's just a little TOO creepy for me...
Sure, I may drift down to my local computer store at lunchtime within the first couple of weeks of Half-Life 2 coming out but there's no way I'm queueing in the rain at midnight like some corporate-controlled mindless robot.
It's JUST entertainment, it's JUST a game, please get a life and some perspective on reality - in other parts of the world, people queue for food & medical supplies to avoid dying. Queuing for a game, DVD, CD, concert ticket, etc. is just a little sick in comparison.
I used to buy from PC World quite a bit until the "convenience" was soon outweighed by the need for return visits.
Some wonderful things happened to me with products from them:
- A hard disk in a sealed box that when I opened it had a fault label on it emblazoned with the words "Totally f*cked"
- Another sealed box for a soundcard that when I opened it contained the driver CD, manual, a couple of cables but no soundcard.
- Buying 50 of their own brand CDRs, the first 10 of which had a 100% failure rate! (I used other brands of CDRs before and after that time on the same drive and they all worked fine.)
In the end, constantly driving back and forth taking stuff back to them just wasn't worth the effort anymore.
Now I buy stuff cheaper on-line and advise everyone I know to do the same...
...make a headset that doesn't make the wearer look like Captain Scarlet on his cap communicator?
Sorry, but anyone that needs to be that connected to their mobile phone probably doesn't have a life that contains many people interested in calling them anyway.
I can't profess to being an expert as I've only been in Best Buy a few times when on holiday or on business in the US.
Yes, they are similar to PC World but also stock hifi, TVS, CDs, DVDs, etc.
However, unlike a PC World salesman, a Best Buy salesman is occasionally capable of taking his knuckles off of the floor to scratch his arse.
On a similar topic, I heard a good joke recently:
What's the difference between a used car salesman and a PC World salesman?
A used car salesman knows that he's lying.
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I agree.
I played it for several hours with an X-Box owning friend of mine - it was okay but IMHO not a patch on the single-player experience of Half-Life or the multi-player experience of Unreal Tournament on my PC.
I accept that in the world of console users, it was probably one of the best FPS games of the time - however, having said that, Metroid Prime on the Gamecube was far superior.
In the PC world, we have been spoilt for good FPSes and even if Halo 2 makes it to the PC, I doubt that few people are going to rush to buy it before Half-Life 2 or Quake 4.
1. Microsoft's Arrogance - Microsoft are not happy just to make and supply operating systems. They want to supply everything. This means that they have such a wide product range and so much recycling of buggy old code that the emphasis they can place on a particular subset of products becomes more and more diluted over time - because they have to devote so much time to bug fixing and to prettifying/unifying their products to a single look and feel.
2. Microsoft's Marketing - Yes, Microsoft are now a victim of their own lies as a result of convincing the public at large that their products are easy to use & maintain and that PCs never go wrong.
As an example, I just built a PC for a friend of mine who has never really worried about computers until it became apparent that her son needed Internet access to do some of his school homework. The sheer amount of information overload I had to give her was just frightening - update and run rhe virus checker regularly, update Windows regularly, update spyware programs regularly, don't use insecure passwords, don't duplicate passwords across different applications, etc. I ended up typing out 3 pages of hints and tips for her in the end.
3. User ignorance and greed - This follows on from 2. because far too many people have fallen for the Microsoft hype and have no clear understanding of how to keep themselves secure when on the Internet. Add to this that everyone wants something for nothing and the result is a whole heap of ignoramuses file-sharing all manner of nasty programs purely because they want their free music.
I don't care what anyone says but this will never happen with Linux. Linux will never be a mono-culture because the fact is that installing and using Linux automatically creates a learning curve meaning that anyone who uses it immediately starts becoming a more knowledgeable computer user. Sure, it takes a long time to become an expert but when you do, it is relatively easy to maintain a system to only run the services you need and to keep those updated. That's why viruses will never spread through a Linux user base because no two Linux machines are every entirely alike and because Linux users don't suffer from the same ignorance that plagues the Windows community.
I, for one, welcome it. I do not want inexperienced users flocking to use Linux purely because of the cool factor. The fact is that moving from Windows to Linux is like changing from being a child to an adult - the first step is to accept that you are responsible for your actions, not anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've been indoors playing your Nintendo for too long, you might want to splatter some sun-block onto your pasty white skin and check for atrophy in your leg muscles before venturing outdoors on the streets...
Sure, MS are spreading FUD about Linux, they're waging their own little war but it isn't the same from the Linux side of things.
Apart from a few zealots, the Linux community is just trying to get a message out, namely "Linux is free, it's an alternative, give it a try" and defneding itself when MS blatanatly lies when making comparisons.
Who cares what software people use as long as it's right for them and that they have been given the correct information to make informed decisions about security, stability, DRM, etc?
it's a shame that ever effort made to merge the ditros together fails miserably.
There has never been any effort to merge the distros together. There has been an effort by United Linux to introduce a standard way of doing things such as the layout of the filesystem, device naming, etc.
However, the reason to have different Linux distros is due to the requirements for which it is used - embedded systems, secure servers, desktop use, etc.
For precisely the same reasons you should be criticising Microsoft for producing Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional, etc.
this is the reason why microsoft will win
Erm, precisely what will Microsoft win? It's already got 95% of the desktop share and most of the corporate share. Yet Linux is being used more and more.
So what determines Microsoft has won??? The Linux community doesn't care, we're just here using it and enjoying it.
My niece, for example, happily uses Windows to do her homework on, play games and surf the Internet. Just because me, her uncle, prefers Linux does not mean I'm going to erase her Windows install and put Red Hat on? The fact is, she uses what she likes to use, I use what I like to use, end of story.
Linux will die out.
How do you work that one out??? It's already embedded in more devices than you could possibly be aware of, Open Source apps like Apache and Sendmail are the core Internet applications and the whole UNIX philosophy started a whole 10 years before Gates even thought of MS-DOS!!!
the community needs to get it's shit together and fast.
Sorry, which community? The Open Source and GNU have been creating and distributing free software for nigh on 20 years now, the Firefox browser is stealing users away from Internet Explorer, third world countries can't get enough of OpenOffice...
Sounds like a community that's got it's "shit" labelled, weighed, measured and filed away in neat cabinets if you ask me!
You need to go off and try Linux yourself, then hate it! At least then your opinion will be valid...
We sure are - Microsoft have enough trouble developing bloated, unstable & insecure applications for one processor architecture, they sure don't want to develop for any others...
If you're that much in love with a corporation that you have to spend time in your life to do their policing for them, then you probably need to go get a few extra hobbies.
I just wonder how many of these Nintendo "fanboys" would report someone selling a few pirated games but step over someone lying unconscious in the gutter...
My own personal experience now amounts to some 20 years in tech support roles and I simply have no interest in entering management because I enjoy "playing" with the latest hardware and software. However, I don't consider that I'm doing my job correctly unless I am trying to make myself redundant by training others in what I know and passing on the knowledge I have freely. My attitude is that if everyone beneath me knows what I know, that frees me up to go learn about new things and always stay on top of the latest technologies.
Unfortunately, a lot of people I've worked with in the past (and to a degree today) have a "jobsworth" attitude of hoarding information and never passing on what they know purely to protect their own jobs - it doesn't matter whether they support Linux, Windows or anything else...
On top of all this, there has always been a huge chasm that separates tech support people from their managers and the rest of the organisation anyway, particularly sales people. I always take the attitude that I'm supporting our products not our customers because I'm trained in fault-finding hardware and software issues that are not usually specific to a specific customer. Therefore, when a salesman phones me and says "You need to work faster on your Acme Corp. fault because they are about to spend $2 million with us", I usually get very angry with that person because of his/her assumption that the speed and efficiency of my work is based upon what the customer spends with us.
The fact is that being in tech support is never easy - you're always associated with being involved only when things go wrong, you do sometimes deal with dorks who only want to pass a problem on to you without staying involved and learning from your experience and you frequently deal with people who do not understand that sometimes you have to experiment and gather information (all of which is time consuming) when you get a problem nobody's seen before.
Yes, I fantasize a lot about just turning somebody's system off or sticking a screwdriver into the micro-circuitry of their product but the reality of the situation is that I like my job and the fact it pays the mortgage.
However, in my experience, they still have IT people that just know how to maintain Microsoft-based systems and, whilst I've no doubt many of those people know MS products well, they have no interest in trying OSS because it's human nature to stay in the "safe zone" in a safe job rather than risk learning something completely new and not being as good in that new area.
What we therefore have is a "chicken and the egg" situation - IT managers not wanting to invest in training and hardware to deploy OSS solutions that might not give them what they need and IT techies not being able to evaluate OSS solutions properly against their existing solutions.
In the UK (and I guess to a degree in the rest of Europe), I keep hearing about the upsurge in IT spending but I don't see salaries rising from the lows they got down to about 2-3 years ago - in my particular case, not that I'm thinking of changing jobs currently anyway, I work in VoIP & telecomms convergence on mainly Linux-based servers and there is simply *nobody* offering anywhere near the salaries that I am currently getting.
I suspect that the next year or so will see a lot of techies going freelance as contractors in order to get the types of salaries they could have got prior to the slump just after the millennium.
However, as the old saying goes, "you pay peanuts, you get monkeys"!
No, it was set up to make someone somewhere some money - I'm assuming that their services are not provided for free?
You are being totally suckered by Microsoft and now is the time to start thinking about what alternative software solutions exist for your enterprise.
No, I am not talking about rolling Linux out on all your corporate desktops and servers overnight - far from it.
However, as every day goes by, you are being dragged deeper and deeper into the Microsoft web without realising it. Attractive licensing deals from MS offer financial discounts to you but in the long term, they lock you more and more into the proprietary world one a single organisation who is just out to do one thing - to make money.
So while you may be spending less money on MS products, just how much money are you now spending on securing mail servers and your intranets from the endless assaults of virii and worms? How much extra have you had to spend on virus checkers in the past year? How many "personal firewalls" have you now deployed over and above the two layer firewalling system that worked perfectly adequately until 18 months ago? How often are you replacing laptops and PCs in your organisation because of the extra demands Microsoft products now make on those machines?
Now Microsoft make this offer of indemnity. What do you think this means to you? What it actually does is drag you in deeper with your Microsoft partnership, you become more dependent on Microsoft, you cannot run your organisation without Microsoft products, Microsoft end up controlling you. In future, it won't matter how insecure or shabby Microsoft products get because you will be so locked into their licensing schemes, you will not be able to escape from them - they become the drug dealer, your corporation becomes the addict.
Think about this now and start to think at other software solutions. Invest some money in looking at alternative ways of doing things in your enterprise - spend some money on a few extra servers, load them with open source alternatives, train some of your IT people to administer them properly, decide for yourself whether open source software is right for your enterprise.
Open source will not give you all you need now - it will do some things better than your existing Microsoft solutions, others it will do worse. However, the open source developers will listen to you if you tell them why you don't like their software and they will try to do something about it if there is a genuine need to make improvements.
But please ACT NOW. Give yourself that lifeline, that "opt-out clause" you create for yourself just in case Microsoft really starts getting heavy on you - believe me, it will happen.
Remember, Microsoft is nothing more than one of your suppliers and should be treated as such - if a supplier lets you down, you start looking at alternative suppliers - the company that provides you with software solutions is no different.
So, spend some money now. Run a few open source servers in parallel to your Microsoft ones, use them, evaluate them, get your users to test them.
But make yourself smarter about the alternatives now before it really is too late for you...
I don't understand your logic here unless you are yourself falling hook, line and sinker for Microsoft FUD.
If you use a piece of Open Source software - actually, let's be more specific, GPL software - you get the right to use and modify that code as you wish, as long as your modifications fall under the GPL also.
If those modifications include code that comes under someone else's IP then, yes, you'd probably get sued for it.
However, how can you be sued for just using software that you believe to be under the GPL? If you did not modify that software such that it infringed someone else's IP rights, how can you be liable for it?
I don't understand what indemnification you, the end user, need for using a product you were told does not conflict with someone else's IP?
Purely because of the fact that as a normal non-root user, every file you work on and save is going to be somewhere in your home directory.
Add to this the numerous command-line text search and manipulation tools and you have all you need to search for what you want - sure, it takes time to learn how to hack together reasonably powerful shell scripts but once you know how to do that, nothing else ever works so easily and powerfully.
But the real issue is what Firefox is doing for the Open Source movement as a whole - for the first time, a FOSS application is becoming well-known across the entire PC-owning world and Joe Public is beginning to see that Microsoft is not the only way of doing things any more - all of a sudden, there's a truly free product that beats a commercial one (yes, you still have to buy Windows to use IE).
Sure, those of us in the know already run The GIMP, Open Office, etc. in Windows or in Linux/UNIX but Firefox is the first FOSS product to really get the exposure to the public at large.
The only thing Mozilla needs to do is to continue to keep the core Firefox code as lean and mean as possible and continue to add features through plugins to let useres choose what features they want - after all, most people are used to "skinning" and customising apps these days so let them decide what functionality they do and do not want.
Otherwise, the developers at Mozilla have done and A1 job so far and deserve our heartiest congratulations for a job well done!
Microsoft have their fingers in just about ever single "software pie" there is currently yet just about everything they make is half-baked, unreliable and full of security holes.
Is it not better to follow the example of Adobe, Symantec, etc. and focus on particular product areas (like graphics and imaging or security) to become specialist and recognised in a much narrower range of products rather than a "jack of all trades but master of none"?
Perhaps if they left search engines to Google and Yahoo, embedded OSes to Palm & Symbian and internet servers to UNIX and Linux, etc., MS wouldn't have the scorn and hatred of just about the entire human race vent on them and would be recognised as product leaders in the desktop OS and office applications arena.
...and you're the king of catchphrases, dude.
Yes, none of us are above being milked by the capitalist system, including myself, and like anyone else, I like playing computer games, listening to music from a large CD collection and watching movies at the cineme and on DVD.
What I hate about the system is the fact that we the people have ultimate power of the corporations because we are the consumers and if we all stop consuming, that's it for them.
The fact that people queue for a computer game or queue hours for tickets to a Star Wars movie premier just strikes me as a really sad thing - almost as though the corporations have a captive audience who have no decision making powers of their own.
No product is so important that you must have it - I just wish people would not play into the corporate hands so easily...
I am not expecting Microsoft or any other corrupt corporation to do anything else other than milk the rest of humankind for as much money as possible.
However, I am making an observation that people queuing to be milked of their money is just a little wierd...
No. I'm just making an observation about queuing and human dignity, that's all.
"You fucker, people die in automobile wrecks EVERY DAY!"
Sure, and if a few more people cared more about the people around them - didn't drink and drive, didn't drive so fast, didn't suffer from road rage - LESS people would die in automobile accidents.
I'm just putting a perspective on our world, nothing more...
Yeah, it'd be nice if they spent a little of that marketing money handing out essentials like food & medication in Iraq, or maybe a little closer to home and hand out some goodies to kids in poor neighbourhoods.
After all, the moment the soldiers move out of Iraq, Microsoft will be straight into Baghdad vulturing for all those big new IT contracts...
Sorry, apologies to vultures - they actually serve a purpose in the scheme of things...
BUT QUEUING UP AT MIDNIGHT FOR A GAME???
Sorry people, but that's just a little TOO creepy for me...
Sure, I may drift down to my local computer store at lunchtime within the first couple of weeks of Half-Life 2 coming out but there's no way I'm queueing in the rain at midnight like some corporate-controlled mindless robot.
It's JUST entertainment, it's JUST a game, please get a life and some perspective on reality - in other parts of the world, people queue for food & medical supplies to avoid dying. Queuing for a game, DVD, CD, concert ticket, etc. is just a little sick in comparison.
Some wonderful things happened to me with products from them:
- A hard disk in a sealed box that when I opened it had a fault label on it emblazoned with the words "Totally f*cked"
- Another sealed box for a soundcard that when I opened it contained the driver CD, manual, a couple of cables but no soundcard.
- Buying 50 of their own brand CDRs, the first 10 of which had a 100% failure rate! (I used other brands of CDRs before and after that time on the same drive and they all worked fine.)
In the end, constantly driving back and forth taking stuff back to them just wasn't worth the effort anymore.
Now I buy stuff cheaper on-line and advise everyone I know to do the same...
Sorry, but anyone that needs to be that connected to their mobile phone probably doesn't have a life that contains many people interested in calling them anyway.
S.I.G.
Yes, they are similar to PC World but also stock hifi, TVS, CDs, DVDs, etc.
However, unlike a PC World salesman, a Best Buy salesman is occasionally capable of taking his knuckles off of the floor to scratch his arse.
On a similar topic, I heard a good joke recently:
What's the difference between a used car salesman and a PC World salesman?
A used car salesman knows that he's lying.
I played it for several hours with an X-Box owning friend of mine - it was okay but IMHO not a patch on the single-player experience of Half-Life or the multi-player experience of Unreal Tournament on my PC.
I accept that in the world of console users, it was probably one of the best FPS games of the time - however, having said that, Metroid Prime on the Gamecube was far superior.
In the PC world, we have been spoilt for good FPSes and even if Halo 2 makes it to the PC, I doubt that few people are going to rush to buy it before Half-Life 2 or Quake 4.
2. Microsoft's Marketing - Yes, Microsoft are now a victim of their own lies as a result of convincing the public at large that their products are easy to use & maintain and that PCs never go wrong.
As an example, I just built a PC for a friend of mine who has never really worried about computers until it became apparent that her son needed Internet access to do some of his school homework. The sheer amount of information overload I had to give her was just frightening - update and run rhe virus checker regularly, update Windows regularly, update spyware programs regularly, don't use insecure passwords, don't duplicate passwords across different applications, etc. I ended up typing out 3 pages of hints and tips for her in the end.
3. User ignorance and greed - This follows on from 2. because far too many people have fallen for the Microsoft hype and have no clear understanding of how to keep themselves secure when on the Internet. Add to this that everyone wants something for nothing and the result is a whole heap of ignoramuses file-sharing all manner of nasty programs purely because they want their free music.
I don't care what anyone says but this will never happen with Linux. Linux will never be a mono-culture because the fact is that installing and using Linux automatically creates a learning curve meaning that anyone who uses it immediately starts becoming a more knowledgeable computer user. Sure, it takes a long time to become an expert but when you do, it is relatively easy to maintain a system to only run the services you need and to keep those updated. That's why viruses will never spread through a Linux user base because no two Linux machines are every entirely alike and because Linux users don't suffer from the same ignorance that plagues the Windows community.
I, for one, welcome it. I do not want inexperienced users flocking to use Linux purely because of the cool factor. The fact is that moving from Windows to Linux is like changing from being a child to an adult - the first step is to accept that you are responsible for your actions, not anyone else.