Well... I don't know about you but I've seen many an open source project run by self-appointed dictators, so I don't think that's the "major" reason at all. Dictators in both worlds are plentiful and a pain. Become too painful in OSS, however, and someone will fork the project.
Which in turn may or may not be successful. The mambo/joomla mess illustrates that some forks work and you end up with two relatively strong branches. Go the other way, and a fork splits its community, diverts resources, and eventually kills off one, the other, or both.
And while no one wants a moron in a suit yelling at them, OSS developers are notorious for chery-picking the "cool" aspects of the project and ignoring others, and generally being insensitive to things like schedules and deadlines.
As to "winning", you have some strange definitions. Get an OS with more than a percentage point or two of the average desktop, and "maybe" you can start waving that flag. Utill then...
The parent posted references. Your assertions remain just that. And it's still interesting that all of these "local" trends happen to be trending upwards all at the same time.
Re:Does any major site use pure CSS?
on
CSS Cookbook
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· Score: 1
Doesn't help. Or, rather, you're missing the point. Since all of the images used are background images, none of them would print in that case. No backgrounds. No accents. No buttons or bullets. No logos. No photos. Nothing.
Re:Does any major site use pure CSS?
on
CSS Cookbook
·
· Score: 1
cssZenGarden is cool, but you need to understand that many of the tricks the various layouts use on don't work on a production site.
Example: Quite a few layouts absolute position many of the elements... but they can only do this because they know the exact size and amount of text in each container. Do a site with dynamic, variable-length titles and content and those layouts would fall apart.
Or the way they use background images to do all of the dirty work, which means that many of the layouts won't print correctly if the user's browser has bg printing disabled, and that simple conventions like clicking the "home" logo to go home fail as well.
Re:Does any major site use pure CSS?
on
CSS Cookbook
·
· Score: 1
That's because the hacks who designed CSS were "purists" who didn't believe in the idea that sites needed layout in the first place. One has only to look at the mess you have to go through to get CSS to do something "simple" like a standard three-equal-length column format with a header and footer to understand this.
They believed that all web sites should be floating, amorphous blobs of contextually-tagged content, and that "layout" is something one does when dealing with quaint anachronisms like paper.
It's really the only possible explanation, as otherwise the odds of having so many major decision points totally screwed up boggles the mind.
An assumption, not backed by fact. Unless you're the author of the system?
Re:That's not an obvious exercise.
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
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· Score: 1
"... and this is different from all traditional business."
Excuse me? I guess you haven't seen the list of engineering patents held by IBM, or the medical patents held by Lilly, or Dow 's patents on chemical manufacturing processes, or Monsanto's genetic ones, or...
Now, if you're talking about software "process" patents like one-click, then I "might" agree, but even then other businesses (non-software) are attempting to "own" things like cash management and tax-avoidance systems.
"Non free software has never been about practicing a profession, it's always been a greedy grab by "owners" of programs often developed at public expense."
Yep. Apple, and MS, and Novell, and Oracle, and Adobe, and SAP, and hundreds of others haven't spend BILLIONS of dollars and literally millions of man-years on software R&D. They just found complete, fully developed systems and programs in the back of some journal, decided to type them in and "own" them, and now have the gall to charge us for it.
How DARE someone spend years writing and developing a piece of software, and then have the nerve to not just give it to you for free, and instead decide ask for some fair compensation for his efforts. Why, he should be thankful that you'd even use the thing. In fact, he should probably pay YOU for your time in doing so.
Apple has the luxury of marrying its OS with great hardware and design.
As pointed out, MS doesn't, and in fact MS has to support every POS software/hardware combination on the planet. Without that level of polish (which MS hasn't shown it can do anyway) and integration, MS's version would just be YAN (Yet Another 'Nix).
"Isn't that at least a high enough success rate to send out a cop to personally ID the guy?"
If the "match" is against, say, an escaped felon, "armed and presumed dangerous," I strongly suspect the cops are going to do just a bit more than saunter up and ask for your id...
Yes, but what if you work in some area, like DC, where they only way to get to work every day is to drive past a battery of these cameras? And you're stopped, daily, because the system says so?
Which is the difference between then and now. Then, someone COULD have done it true, but statistically, the odds of it happening were slight. (Cop being there, you being there, cop noticing you and running a check, dozens of other people not being checked because cop was checking someone else, cop not munching a donut, and so on.)
Whereas a system like this checks everyone, everytime.
And if such a system throw false positives, then it WILL have an impact. Especially if the "match" is against, say, an escaped felon, "armed and presumed dangerous."
And what happens in that alternate universe when they do that, and suddenly are unable to differentiate themselves from dozens of other nearly identical systems? Guess they stop being an OS company, huh?
Re:That's not an obvious exercise.
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 1
"The social and dollar cost of proprietary software development never made sense to begin with."
Oh please, it makes as much "sense" in terms of social and dollar costs as does any business in any field. I could just as easily say the social and dollar costs of charging people for food never made sense to begin with. as everyone would pay less and have to spend less time working if some benevolent agency provided all of it for free. Or if we all just traded an hour a week down at the communal farm.
The "sense" comes from the value proposition: if I spend $200 for Excel do I think I'll save $200, or better yet, make $200 down the road? If I think that, yes. having a half dozen people with Excel means that I'm not going need a room full of two dozen others scribbling on pads and punching numbers on calculators, then the "costs" of Excel are inconsequential, as having it saved me money.
And paying for software meant that we could assemble a team of dedicated people working fulltime to produce it. In a way, OSS is the abberation, in that it exists solely because other people, and organizations, are willing to subsidize it with their time and money.
Not to mention the benefits to society of gainfully employing that team of people, and the benefits of having a profitable company out there paying taxes, and creating value for stockholders, which makes everyone else's saivings and pension and retirement plans possible, and that team in turn paying taxes, buying products, and so on. Lots of complex ripple effects there.
Besides, the great OSS experiment isn't over yet. I'm not totally convinced, for example, that some of the arguments regarding the anti-competitive nature of OSS don't have weight. How do I, for example, assemble that dedicated team of people to work fulltime on a potential successor to some piece of software if there's an "adequate" free version out there that most will use no matter what? Look at how, say, Netscape was unable to compete against IE. Seems to me that one consequence of "free" software could well be lack-of-choice.
Most reasonable people understand that even "free" has costs.
"Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." -Henry Spencer
Isn't that the definition of Linux? Or was that, "Those who can not afford UNIX..."
(ducks and runs)
Re:I'm not sure what you're getting at
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 1
Actually, on WIndows there's a little system tray icon that pops up when you stick in a thumb drive. You're supposed to use it to unmount the device before removing it to prevent data loss.
Speaking of yawns, did you catch the one line, "...the next destinations of the new PS3 owners was clear--go home and get some rest."
Is that guy serious? These people stand in line for days after waiting for MONTHS for the PS3 to be released... and they finally get one... and this guy thinks that now they're going to go home and SLEEP???
"Generally speaking, we won't be migrating to Mac OS/X because we demand an environment where we are in control."
With millions upon millions of lines of kernel code, file, memory and dozens of other mangers, UI systems, the BIOS, firmware controllers, video, network and other hardware drivers, and not counting all of the lines of code in the applications, tools, and ultilities running on top of that code base, and 99.9999% of it, in all likelyhood, written by thousands of people you don't know and never have met, I submit that any "control" you think you have is purely illusionary.
But hey, compile a few sources sight-unseen and tweek all the preference-file settings you want, if that's what it takes to make you think you're in "control".
"But I digress. The point is not to convert the unwashed masses; the point is to get a critical mass of the technically competent users and the enthusiasts to leave Windows (mostly, if not fully) for Linux. "
Of course, you also have someone else (Apple) going after that same critical mass of the technically competent users and the enthusiasts, also in an attempt to get them to leave Windows... for OS X.
And they have millions of dollars to spend on marketing, and a retail presence, and an end-user training and support structure to help said users when they get into trouble.
Not to mention the little fact that OS X already has ALL of the stability and protection advantages of a Linux/UNIX environment. And OS X is also "free" when you buy a new Mac. And it also runs nearly every piece of F/OSS software out there, as well as MS Office, Photoshop, Quicken, and most of the other major commercial applications. And it's supported by most of the hardware types like Canon, Epson, and so on.
Linux, OTOH, doesn't have the same level of marketing, retail, tech support, commercial applications, or HW support.
In fact, Linux's main advantage is that it's free (already covered) and that, should the average home or business user want to do so, they can recompile their system at any point in time...
Putting it in the road means that the power receiver could be as close as six inches away from the transmitter, maximizing power transfer and minimizing loses.
The GPL prevents that. Any improvements that are distributed beyond the improver him/it-self must effectively be made available to the community in general. Other licenses, like the BSDs do not protect against that sort of free-rider problem
What improvements? IBM or HP can easily slap the software on a box and make money from selling the box or services that use it, as is, and use OSS only as a value-add to make that hardware or those services more valuable. Like them, I too can setup a company that provides consulting services, or even hardware-based-solutions, all using a standard LAMP stack, with no "improvements" needed, and no need to give anything back at all.
I suspect we'd be bankrupt, as tearing up every street, road, and highway in the country to bury the transmitters is going to be a fairly expensive proposition...
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Well... I don't know about you but I've seen many an open source project run by self-appointed dictators, so I don't think that's the "major" reason at all. Dictators in both worlds are plentiful and a pain. Become too painful in OSS, however, and someone will fork the project.
Which in turn may or may not be successful. The mambo/joomla mess illustrates that some forks work and you end up with two relatively strong branches. Go the other way, and a fork splits its community, diverts resources, and eventually kills off one, the other, or both.
And while no one wants a moron in a suit yelling at them, OSS developers are notorious for chery-picking the "cool" aspects of the project and ignoring others, and generally being insensitive to things like schedules and deadlines.
As to "winning", you have some strange definitions. Get an OS with more than a percentage point or two of the average desktop, and "maybe" you can start waving that flag. Utill then...
The parent posted references. Your assertions remain just that. And it's still interesting that all of these "local" trends happen to be trending upwards all at the same time.
Doesn't help. Or, rather, you're missing the point. Since all of the images used are background images, none of them would print in that case. No backgrounds. No accents. No buttons or bullets. No logos. No photos. Nothing.
cssZenGarden is cool, but you need to understand that many of the tricks the various layouts use on don't work on a production site.
Example: Quite a few layouts absolute position many of the elements... but they can only do this because they know the exact size and amount of text in each container. Do a site with dynamic, variable-length titles and content and those layouts would fall apart.
Or the way they use background images to do all of the dirty work, which means that many of the layouts won't print correctly if the user's browser has bg printing disabled, and that simple conventions like clicking the "home" logo to go home fail as well.
That's because the hacks who designed CSS were "purists" who didn't believe in the idea that sites needed layout in the first place. One has only to look at the mess you have to go through to get CSS to do something "simple" like a standard three-equal-length column format with a header and footer to understand this.
They believed that all web sites should be floating, amorphous blobs of contextually-tagged content, and that "layout" is something one does when dealing with quaint anachronisms like paper.
It's really the only possible explanation, as otherwise the odds of having so many major decision points totally screwed up boggles the mind.
Your orignal comment was, "What if the system was only 50% sucessful?" With the implication that 50% of the time it's going to be unsuccessful.
My example simply served to demonstrate the severity of that potential mistake...
An assumption, not backed by fact. Unless you're the author of the system?
"... and this is different from all traditional business."
Excuse me? I guess you haven't seen the list of engineering patents held by IBM, or the medical patents held by Lilly, or Dow 's patents on chemical manufacturing processes, or Monsanto's genetic ones, or...
Now, if you're talking about software "process" patents like one-click, then I "might" agree, but even then other businesses (non-software) are attempting to "own" things like cash management and tax-avoidance systems.
"Non free software has never been about practicing a profession, it's always been a greedy grab by "owners" of programs often developed at public expense."
Yep. Apple, and MS, and Novell, and Oracle, and Adobe, and SAP, and hundreds of others haven't spend BILLIONS of dollars and literally millions of man-years on software R&D. They just found complete, fully developed systems and programs in the back of some journal, decided to type them in and "own" them, and now have the gall to charge us for it.
How DARE someone spend years writing and developing a piece of software, and then have the nerve to not just give it to you for free, and instead decide ask for some fair compensation for his efforts. Why, he should be thankful that you'd even use the thing. In fact, he should probably pay YOU for your time in doing so.
Idiot.
Apple has the luxury of marrying its OS with great hardware and design.
As pointed out, MS doesn't, and in fact MS has to support every POS software/hardware combination on the planet. Without that level of polish (which MS hasn't shown it can do anyway) and integration, MS's version would just be YAN (Yet Another 'Nix).
"Isn't that at least a high enough success rate to send out a cop to personally ID the guy?"
If the "match" is against, say, an escaped felon, "armed and presumed dangerous," I strongly suspect the cops are going to do just a bit more than saunter up and ask for your id...
Yes, but what if you work in some area, like DC, where they only way to get to work every day is to drive past a battery of these cameras? And you're stopped, daily, because the system says so?
Which is the difference between then and now. Then, someone COULD have done it true, but statistically, the odds of it happening were slight. (Cop being there, you being there, cop noticing you and running a check, dozens of other people not being checked because cop was checking someone else, cop not munching a donut, and so on.)
Whereas a system like this checks everyone, everytime.
And if such a system throw false positives, then it WILL have an impact. Especially if the "match" is against, say, an escaped felon, "armed and presumed dangerous."
And what happens in that alternate universe when they do that, and suddenly are unable to differentiate themselves from dozens of other nearly identical systems? Guess they stop being an OS company, huh?
"The social and dollar cost of proprietary software development never made sense to begin with."
Oh please, it makes as much "sense" in terms of social and dollar costs as does any business in any field. I could just as easily say the social and dollar costs of charging people for food never made sense to begin with. as everyone would pay less and have to spend less time working if some benevolent agency provided all of it for free. Or if we all just traded an hour a week down at the communal farm.
The "sense" comes from the value proposition: if I spend $200 for Excel do I think I'll save $200, or better yet, make $200 down the road? If I think that, yes. having a half dozen people with Excel means that I'm not going need a room full of two dozen others scribbling on pads and punching numbers on calculators, then the "costs" of Excel are inconsequential, as having it saved me money.
And paying for software meant that we could assemble a team of dedicated people working fulltime to produce it. In a way, OSS is the abberation, in that it exists solely because other people, and organizations, are willing to subsidize it with their time and money.
Not to mention the benefits to society of gainfully employing that team of people, and the benefits of having a profitable company out there paying taxes, and creating value for stockholders, which makes everyone else's saivings and pension and retirement plans possible, and that team in turn paying taxes, buying products, and so on. Lots of complex ripple effects there.
Besides, the great OSS experiment isn't over yet. I'm not totally convinced, for example, that some of the arguments regarding the anti-competitive nature of OSS don't have weight. How do I, for example, assemble that dedicated team of people to work fulltime on a potential successor to some piece of software if there's an "adequate" free version out there that most will use no matter what? Look at how, say, Netscape was unable to compete against IE. Seems to me that one consequence of "free" software could well be lack-of-choice.
Most reasonable people understand that even "free" has costs.
"Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." -Henry Spencer
Isn't that the definition of Linux? Or was that, "Those who can not afford UNIX..."
(ducks and runs)
Actually, on WIndows there's a little system tray icon that pops up when you stick in a thumb drive. You're supposed to use it to unmount the device before removing it to prevent data loss.
Speaking of yawns, did you catch the one line, "...the next destinations of the new PS3 owners was clear--go home and get some rest."
Is that guy serious? These people stand in line for days after waiting for MONTHS for the PS3 to be released... and they finally get one... and this guy thinks that now they're going to go home and SLEEP???
Fine, but I get to design the tests....
"Generally speaking, we won't be migrating to Mac OS/X because we demand an environment where we are in control."
With millions upon millions of lines of kernel code, file, memory and dozens of other mangers, UI systems, the BIOS, firmware controllers, video, network and other hardware drivers, and not counting all of the lines of code in the applications, tools, and ultilities running on top of that code base, and 99.9999% of it, in all likelyhood, written by thousands of people you don't know and never have met, I submit that any "control" you think you have is purely illusionary.
But hey, compile a few sources sight-unseen and tweek all the preference-file settings you want, if that's what it takes to make you think you're in "control".
"But I digress. The point is not to convert the unwashed masses; the point is to get a critical mass of the technically competent users and the enthusiasts to leave Windows (mostly, if not fully) for Linux. "
Of course, you also have someone else (Apple) going after that same critical mass of the technically competent users and the enthusiasts, also in an attempt to get them to leave Windows... for OS X.
And they have millions of dollars to spend on marketing, and a retail presence, and an end-user training and support structure to help said users when they get into trouble.
Not to mention the little fact that OS X already has ALL of the stability and protection advantages of a Linux/UNIX environment. And OS X is also "free" when you buy a new Mac. And it also runs nearly every piece of F/OSS software out there, as well as MS Office, Photoshop, Quicken, and most of the other major commercial applications. And it's supported by most of the hardware types like Canon, Epson, and so on.
Linux, OTOH, doesn't have the same level of marketing, retail, tech support, commercial applications, or HW support.
In fact, Linux's main advantage is that it's free (already covered) and that, should the average home or business user want to do so, they can recompile their system at any point in time...
"Apple is on a slippery slope."
Or not. Just because they may make an iPhone doesn't mean they have to stop making iPods. You'll still have a choice.
Now I've got a Motorola RAZR, and they've somehow lost the ability to recognize that a single person can have multiple numbers.
Not to say RTFM, but RTFM. There's an option you can set to have it consolidate phone numbers.
"but it [sic] in the light fixtures overhead"
Putting it in the road means that the power receiver could be as close as six inches away from the transmitter, maximizing power transfer and minimizing loses.
The GPL prevents that. Any improvements that are distributed beyond the improver him/it-self must effectively be made available to the community in general. Other licenses, like the BSDs do not protect against that sort of free-rider problem
What improvements? IBM or HP can easily slap the software on a box and make money from selling the box or services that use it, as is, and use OSS only as a value-add to make that hardware or those services more valuable. Like them, I too can setup a company that provides consulting services, or even hardware-based-solutions, all using a standard LAMP stack, with no "improvements" needed, and no need to give anything back at all.
In which case the GPL prevents nothing.
I suspect we'd be bankrupt, as tearing up every street, road, and highway in the country to bury the transmitters is going to be a fairly expensive proposition...
I already have a power converter in my van, so you're stuck no matter what you do...