I don't think the free market, specially normal consumers, will like subscription based goods.
The market has already proven that customers will get sucked into perpetual payments (subscriptions) if the snow job is good enough.
People have been suckered into multi-year subscriptions to cell phones and cars which they will never own (or will own after paying exhorbitants amounts of cash).
Most people will fail to do the basic math that would clearly show how bad these subscriptions are, and will easily get taken in by slick ads and slicker (aka greasier) salespeople.
Never underestimate the overwhelming desire of people to not have to use their brain.
Since this is a spam subject, this is at least partly relevant:
I am a Direcway subscriber, and I was accustomed (angry, but accustomed) to receiving about 15-20 spams per day for as long as I can remember.
Slashdot ran a story within the last 6 months (I don't remember which one exactly) about the FBI raiding one or two of the largest spammers and confiscating their setup.
Almost to the day that the raid was to have occurred, all spam to my inbox instantly stopped. I haven't gotten a single spam message since the about the same time as the second raid.
It seems to me that those guys may have been the sole sources of all the spam going through Direcway to my account. Are there any other Direcway subscribers here that had the same experience, was the whole thing just an extraordinary coincidence, or did Direcway find the holy grail of anti-spam?
As far as I can tell, all my regular email is getting through and going out. No email that I knew was coming has yet failed to arrive, so any filtering at Direcway's servers, if such a tactic is being employed, is doing a great job.
Konqueror is Mozilla-enabled only in the sense that Konqueror implements the Netscape plugin architecture, as does Mozilla. Konqueror does not use the Mozilla rendering engine (Gecko), but rather uses its own engine (khtml).
"I've been plagarizing for 3.9 years, and right as I was about to graduate, you told me I couldn't. You shouldn't be allowed to kick someone out for plagarism after they pay you for 4 years of education."
Congratulations, Mr. Plagiarist! We've found over time that an average of four years is required for someone to fully understand the impact of claiming someone else's work as his own. You have learned the consequences of this particular form of cheating in only 3.9 years, and are therefore ahead of the curve and in no further need of our services.
Here is a University refund for the unused 0.1 years of your schooling. Have a nice life; and no, I don't want fries with that.
they did not dare to eat because I had prepared the meat balls WITH MY BARE HANDS after washing them.
When I was reading through this, I was waiting for (what I had anticipated to be) the inevitable, "made them with my bare hands after having done gross things with them all day." I thought you were going to say stuff like, "Europeans always eat food that was cooked with dirty hands and no one has ever gotten sick from it." I was mentally preparing my response that the American family was fully justified in rejecting your food that was prepared with bare hands that hadn't been washed all day.
Then I read the part I quoted above, and realized that you thought this was typical behavior in American homes. It is not typical, and is actually the first time I, having been born nearly 35 years ago and having lived my entire life in various parts of the States, have ever heard of this outside of restaurants.
Public food services are required to wear plastic gloves when handling food, but I have never seen this done in private homes.
Most Americans are extremely steadfast in requiring washed hands around food, but resorting to plastic gloves for food handling at home probably indicates some type of mental disorder.
You're probably lucky you got out of there alive...;)
Their focus is on integration, because that is the weakness of their competitors.
Star Office started out as a singular massive (aka: integrated) office suite. People hated it because everything was loaded even if the user just wanted to create a specific type of document. The spreadsheet was loaded even if only the word processor was being used, etc.
The OpenOffice team has put a lot of effort into separating components to make them more resource efficient. When people use a spreadsheet, they don't want the word processor, presentation manager, graphics editor, or anything else to come along for the ride.
Calling this a weakness is to ignore recent history. This isn't a weakness. This is what people want.
in my opinion there are too many office products to compete with MS. they need to work together, especially a common save file format.
KWord and AbiWord are adopting the OO.o writer file format. I share your opinion that every other office suite would be well served by also adopting (and adhering to!) the same.
Nothing prevents C++ tools from having the same features you're talking about. It's all a matter of what the IDE developers decide to include in the IDE.
The one feature of Java that I miss when writing large C++ applications is the ability for each class to have have its own main() method. That provides a nice avenue for debugging that is unavailable in C++.
If you want to run on even one other platform...look forward to resolving lots of issues that bear a striking resemblance to porting software in any other environment.
I've written many client-side Java applications that make use of audio, networking, data storage, etc. that work identically between Linux and Windows in binary form. Java portability (JVM bugs notwithstanding) has been 99%, with JVM bugs accounting for the 1% incompability since they caused subtle runtime differences.
I stopped writing Java clients for three reasons:
Resource usage was unacceptably high.
GUI runtime performance was unacceptably low.
Qt provides me with all the important benefits of Java: instant distribution in the county [when the binary is put on a shared volume], a single source tree between Windows and Linux, and a well designed and easy to use API.
Binary portability has never been an issue when sticking to the SUN-defined Java API.
"Peter Gabriel has already done this with his MUDDA project."
Unfortunately he ties everything to Windows Media Player, which makes it completely useless to me and many others. The various sites won't even load without those.
I haven't acquired any new music since the mid 90's, largely because I grew to detest the RIAA (later) and largely because new popular music by that time had sunk to intolerable lows.
I sampled several new (to me) artists via indepedent labels such as CD Baby and a few others that Slashdotters have mentioned from time to time, and 18 out of 20 songs I sampled have been so horrible that I stopped trying.
I wanted to get new music from non-RIAA established names, so I tried the MUDDA project on your suggestion. However, its member sites apparently don't want to sell to me or to let me sample their offerings (I use Linux).
That's their choice, of course. They can choose to not sell to me, and I can choose to not buy from them. We both lose, though.
It's scary more than anything, as it'll just make what he says seem more 'credible'
Read the article, as it spends quite a number of lines describing just how incredible this guy is. He contradicts and deludes himself frequently. Maybe that's why he left Redhat for Microsoft.
About ten years ago when a large number of people who did not read this started being exposed to Linux and friends.
For those of our readers who didn't catch it, there is no "X-Windows". There are several permutations on the X Window System name, but the plural of "window" is not, and has never been, one of them.
For the record, I was just as guilty as the rest of calling the X Window System "X-Windows" until I was pointed to the man page once or twice.
"It couldn't have a framebuffer even if it wanted to, unless you only wanted 16x8 resolution."
I wrote a lot of assembler on the 6809 (CoCo 3), and a few text-based games. The text-screen was 32x16, and most of my useful assembler programs that manipulated that screen came in well under 4K (2K was my average) and used well under 128 bytes for data storage.
The machine had a video generator that could be pointed to any point in memory within the machine, regardless of what that memory area was actually used for (data storage, program execution, stack -- didn't matter).
I empathize with the homebrew developers. Developing with limited machine capacity is very fun, and sometimes very frustrating.
The CoCo had floppy drive support, but the read/write timing had to be exact since the drive had no interrupt support. The result being that while data were being read/written, the machine was in a very tight waiting loop to the exclusion of all else. Even system interrupts had to be turned off to get the needed clock cycles.
Only the NMI (Non-Maskable Interrupt) could be left on (it was impossible to turn off, hence "non-maskable"), but it was attached to the "failure" mode of the drive (the only actual interrupt it used, but only if the hardware failed).
"I think it's pretty classy of Tanenbaum to step up and offer some perspective on the AdTI FUD."
I agree completely. I don't have to agree with everything Andrew says to realize that the man demonstrates the utmost integrity by defending a person (Linus) whose opinion on a subject important to them both is drastically different from his own, and by defending him for no other reason than to make sure the truth is known.
Based on my perusal of the site, this is not Open Source software and has nothing to do with the differences between Open Source and Free software (which are mostly marketing/presentation, by the way).
Most Open Source software is released under the GPL and is also Free software (again, the biggest difference is how the two are presented to PHBs).
This is, though, a good and common example of how proprietary software will usually come back to bite you when you least expect it.
"I, like every other slashdotter, don't want to pay for my cool software tools. That's the plain truth of the matter."
Thanks for reminding me that I need to order Mandrake 10 Power Pack. I had almost forgotten since my current paid-for version of 9.2 Power Pack (at home) and my paid-for version of 9.1 Power Pack (at work) still work so well that I don't have a functional need to upgrade.
It's a good thing that I want all my cool toys for free. Oh wait...
"We all rant about things that MS got wrong and the superiorities of *nix over MS - why not apply all that to UI's as well?"
Because most of the time people, when confronted with a different UI, shreak and complain about how they'll never use it because it requires them to learn too many new things.
Change has to be gradual, but familiarity has to be maintained. When I show people Konqueror's split panes, they panic. Over the course of a few days to a few weeks, they learn how to use it somewhat effectively.
KDE has a good number of these UI enhancements over Windows, but most of the users I've introduced to KDE get very scared when I diverge from the things to which they are accustomed.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the free market, specially normal consumers, will like subscription based goods.
The market has already proven that customers will get sucked into perpetual payments (subscriptions) if the snow job is good enough.
People have been suckered into multi-year subscriptions to cell phones and cars which they will never own (or will own after paying exhorbitants amounts of cash).
Most people will fail to do the basic math that would clearly show how bad these subscriptions are, and will easily get taken in by slick ads and slicker (aka greasier) salespeople.
Never underestimate the overwhelming desire of people to not have to use their brain.
whichever program has more threads running at the end of a time limit wins.
10 spawn thread
20 goto 10
Woohoo! I win!
I like the idea of using Knoppix on commodity PC hardware for e-voting in combination with Open Source software handling to voting process.
If e-voting is going to be used at all, transparency in the process is paramount. This type of system would guarantee that.
Since this is a spam subject, this is at least partly relevant:
I am a Direcway subscriber, and I was accustomed (angry, but accustomed) to receiving about 15-20 spams per day for as long as I can remember.
Slashdot ran a story within the last 6 months (I don't remember which one exactly) about the FBI raiding one or two of the largest spammers and confiscating their setup.
Almost to the day that the raid was to have occurred, all spam to my inbox instantly stopped. I haven't gotten a single spam message since the about the same time as the second raid.
It seems to me that those guys may have been the sole sources of all the spam going through Direcway to my account. Are there any other Direcway subscribers here that had the same experience, was the whole thing just an extraordinary coincidence, or did Direcway find the holy grail of anti-spam?
As far as I can tell, all my regular email is getting through and going out. No email that I knew was coming has yet failed to arrive, so any filtering at Direcway's servers, if such a tactic is being employed, is doing a great job.
Konqueror is Mozilla-enabled only in the sense that Konqueror implements the Netscape plugin architecture, as does Mozilla. Konqueror does not use the Mozilla rendering engine (Gecko), but rather uses its own engine (khtml).
"I've been plagarizing for 3.9 years, and right as I was about to graduate, you told me I couldn't. You shouldn't be allowed to kick someone out for plagarism after they pay you for 4 years of education."
Congratulations, Mr. Plagiarist! We've found over time that an average of four years is required for someone to fully understand the impact of claiming someone else's work as his own. You have learned the consequences of this particular form of cheating in only 3.9 years, and are therefore ahead of the curve and in no further need of our services.
Here is a University refund for the unused 0.1 years of your schooling. Have a nice life; and no, I don't want fries with that.
they did not dare to eat because I had prepared the meat balls WITH MY BARE HANDS after washing them.
;)
When I was reading through this, I was waiting for (what I had anticipated to be) the inevitable, "made them with my bare hands after having done gross things with them all day." I thought you were going to say stuff like, "Europeans always eat food that was cooked with dirty hands and no one has ever gotten sick from it." I was mentally preparing my response that the American family was fully justified in rejecting your food that was prepared with bare hands that hadn't been washed all day.
Then I read the part I quoted above, and realized that you thought this was typical behavior in American homes. It is not typical, and is actually the first time I, having been born nearly 35 years ago and having lived my entire life in various parts of the States, have ever heard of this outside of restaurants.
Public food services are required to wear plastic gloves when handling food, but I have never seen this done in private homes.
Most Americans are extremely steadfast in requiring washed hands around food, but resorting to plastic gloves for food handling at home probably indicates some type of mental disorder.
You're probably lucky you got out of there alive...
Their focus is on integration, because that is the weakness of their competitors.
Star Office started out as a singular massive (aka: integrated) office suite. People hated it because everything was loaded even if the user just wanted to create a specific type of document. The spreadsheet was loaded even if only the word processor was being used, etc.
The OpenOffice team has put a lot of effort into separating components to make them more resource efficient. When people use a spreadsheet, they don't want the word processor, presentation manager, graphics editor, or anything else to come along for the ride.
Calling this a weakness is to ignore recent history. This isn't a weakness. This is what people want.
in my opinion there are too many office products to compete with MS. they need to work together, especially a common save file format.
KWord and AbiWord are adopting the OO.o writer file format. I share your opinion that every other office suite would be well served by also adopting (and adhering to!) the same.
Nothing prevents C++ tools from having the same features you're talking about. It's all a matter of what the IDE developers decide to include in the IDE.
The one feature of Java that I miss when writing large C++ applications is the ability for each class to have have its own main() method. That provides a nice avenue for debugging that is unavailable in C++.
I've written many client-side Java applications that make use of audio, networking, data storage, etc. that work identically between Linux and Windows in binary form. Java portability (JVM bugs notwithstanding) has been 99%, with JVM bugs accounting for the 1% incompability since they caused subtle runtime differences.
I stopped writing Java clients for three reasons:
Binary portability has never been an issue when sticking to the SUN-defined Java API.
My advice is this: Do what I do, and read the "old news" section instead of the front page.
The only difference would be that sites from older stories would get slashdotted instead of sites from newer stories.
"Peter Gabriel has already done this with his MUDDA project."
Unfortunately he ties everything to Windows Media Player, which makes it completely useless to me and many others. The various sites won't even load without those.
I haven't acquired any new music since the mid 90's, largely because I grew to detest the RIAA (later) and largely because new popular music by that time had sunk to intolerable lows.
I sampled several new (to me) artists via indepedent labels such as CD Baby and a few others that Slashdotters have mentioned from time to time, and 18 out of 20 songs I sampled have been so horrible that I stopped trying.
I wanted to get new music from non-RIAA established names, so I tried the MUDDA project on your suggestion. However, its member sites apparently don't want to sell to me or to let me sample their offerings (I use Linux).
That's their choice, of course. They can choose to not sell to me, and I can choose to not buy from them. We both lose, though.
It's scary more than anything, as it'll just make what he says seem more 'credible'
Read the article, as it spends quite a number of lines describing just how incredible this guy is. He contradicts and deludes himself frequently. Maybe that's why he left Redhat for Microsoft.
"In terms of longevity, I've heard that William the Conqueror was tracking his troops using ISAM files when he invaded England in 1066."
;)
England? That's in Texas, right?
"When did the term "X-Windows" come into play?"
About ten years ago when a large number of people who did not read this started being exposed to Linux and friends.
For those of our readers who didn't catch it, there is no "X-Windows". There are several permutations on the X Window System name, but the plural of "window" is not, and has never been, one of them.
For the record, I was just as guilty as the rest of calling the X Window System "X-Windows" until I was pointed to the man page once or twice.
when one searched for "breast enlargement" (in the local language).
You're French and your plastic surgeon works for McDonald's (I heard that Big Mac is French slang for large breast)?
"It couldn't have a framebuffer even if it wanted to, unless you only wanted 16x8 resolution."
:)
I wrote a lot of assembler on the 6809 (CoCo 3), and a few text-based games. The text-screen was 32x16, and most of my useful assembler programs that manipulated that screen came in well under 4K (2K was my average) and used well under 128 bytes for data storage.
The machine had a video generator that could be pointed to any point in memory within the machine, regardless of what that memory area was actually used for (data storage, program execution, stack -- didn't matter).
I empathize with the homebrew developers. Developing with limited machine capacity is very fun, and sometimes very frustrating.
The CoCo had floppy drive support, but the read/write timing had to be exact since the drive had no interrupt support. The result being that while data were being read/written, the machine was in a very tight waiting loop to the exclusion of all else. Even system interrupts had to be turned off to get the needed clock cycles.
Only the NMI (Non-Maskable Interrupt) could be left on (it was impossible to turn off, hence "non-maskable"), but it was attached to the "failure" mode of the drive (the only actual interrupt it used, but only if the hardware failed).
Those were the days.
"I think it's pretty classy of Tanenbaum to step up and offer some perspective on the AdTI FUD."
I agree completely. I don't have to agree with everything Andrew says to realize that the man demonstrates the utmost integrity by defending a person (Linus) whose opinion on a subject important to them both is drastically different from his own, and by defending him for no other reason than to make sure the truth is known.
There's a man I can respect.
"Nope, let's CG lava, CG platforms, and greenscreen our actors instead so we have no class left."
You were expecting them to fight on real lava in a real volcano? How would you suggest the illusion be created if not for CG and green screens?
" I think they are sitting on about six billion in cash the last I heard."
Maybe back in 1994. In 2004, Microsoft is sitting on more than forty billion in cash.
Based on my perusal of the site, this is not Open Source software and has nothing to do with the differences between Open Source and Free software (which are mostly marketing/presentation, by the way).
Most Open Source software is released under the GPL and is also Free software (again, the biggest difference is how the two are presented to PHBs).
This is, though, a good and common example of how proprietary software will usually come back to bite you when you least expect it.
"I, like every other slashdotter, don't want to pay for my cool software tools. That's the plain truth of the matter."
Thanks for reminding me that I need to order Mandrake 10 Power Pack. I had almost forgotten since my current paid-for version of 9.2 Power Pack (at home) and my paid-for version of 9.1 Power Pack (at work) still work so well that I don't have a functional need to upgrade.
It's a good thing that I want all my cool toys for free. Oh wait...
"...This means that KDE is 100% GPL..."
Close. The KDE libraries are 100% LGPL, while Qt/X11 is 100% GPL. A GPL port of Qt to Windows is well underway.
"We all rant about things that MS got wrong and the superiorities of *nix over MS - why not apply all that to UI's as well?"
Because most of the time people, when confronted with a different UI, shreak and complain about how they'll never use it because it requires them to learn too many new things.
Change has to be gradual, but familiarity has to be maintained. When I show people Konqueror's split panes, they panic. Over the course of a few days to a few weeks, they learn how to use it somewhat effectively.
KDE has a good number of these UI enhancements over Windows, but most of the users I've introduced to KDE get very scared when I diverge from the things to which they are accustomed.