People buy windows *because* it comes with the goodies already there, it just works.
Nonsense. People buy windows because their school taught them it, their workplace uses it, their friends use it, their last computer had it, and almost every computer on the market comes with it pre-installed. Oh and most commercial software is designed for windows alone.
In fact, many clueless users are are outraged their expensive hardware _doesn't_ allow them to do basic tasks out of the box. E.g. many people buy machines under the assumption that one with a DVD drive will allow the playback of DVDs out of the box.
The 51st state is unimpressed to be described as 'Third World'. After all, you're copying our population surveillance techniques, not the other way round.
Too right. In some cases, the industry can learn to to work together to a benificial end - a good example is the number of open INXs which make the net possible (or at least cheaper).
What it required here is an anti-spammer coalition, requiring at least 2 major email providers (yahoo & microsoft would be good), to work with VISA and Mastercard to shut down the spammers fast. By filtering truely huge amounts of mail, the coalition could be the first on the scene when a new phishing/spammer site appears. Making a transaction with a valid credit card number could then flag the spammer to VISA, who can instantly revoke the sellers merchant ID, and the flood of lusers signing up for AD0BE, M1CR0S0FT, V11111AGGRRRRR! would watch their transactions bounce. thus eductating both spammer and spamee alike, and making the world a better place.
I wonder if someone could post a checklist of why this won't work?
The odds are against you generating a real credit card number. The system is designed that way as a security measure. The set of valid numbers is some huge multiple of the issued cards, and when you tie that in with the necessity of providing valid supporting information...
anyway, if you could do that, then you could expect to see people brute forcing amazon's payment system in the same way.
Open Source doesn't make money
on
McVoy Strikes Back
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
From TFA: To be sure, a few open source companies are successfully generating revenue and even (possibly) profits. But none of them generates enough money to do anything really innovative, says McVoy, 43, an industry veteran who has developed operating system software at Sun Microsystems, SGI and Google.
Of course, having working at Google, he would know what a curse open source is. No wonder Google make no money with all that OSS they use (and create).
True innovation is rare amongst computer software, and none of the big players can claim much. Microsoft and Oracle for example, made their millions from tweaking and marketing the ideas of others. Can anyone tell me if BitKeeper contains any innovations?
It's not a curse of open source, just the way things are made.
Not that these things matter, since Free software is about making good software available to everyone, not about innovations.
No such thing as too much information, just information which is badly organised.
I am connected to a web with a lot of gigabytes of data - the Internet. It's a lot of data, but with the right tools and knowledge, it's not useless.
It's when you factor in using the wrong tools, lack of knowledge and malicious attempts to attract your attention that you get information overload.
It's an overrated buzzword anyway. It seems to be most used for the same reason the previous generation complained about the pace of life being quicker these days.
That web page you metioned renders horrendously in Firefox 1.0.1 (Linux)....
I see large initial caps on the section headings, which intefere with the readability, but otherwise the site seems clean, uncluttered and attractive to me. That's on Windows 2000 with Firefox 1.0.3.
I have one other bugbear, which I can't blame this site for above others: I dislike the use of compressed date formats except where necessary - Monday 16th May 2005 would fit easily and neatly, and it takes my brain much less time to parse than 2005-05-16. That might just be me though.
I don't want them to see my site the way they want to see it. I want them to see it the way it was meant to be seen.
That's why GreaseMonkey exists. It allows firefox to do the work your eyes and hands must otherwise do - it gets you the information you're after, not what the designer fancies.
(I actually like your site design, and I think it is great you are releasing your work under the GPL and your content under a CC license)
Not only an incentive to produce bugs, but a proof of concept. A business model for the future. Create an entire industry from nothing by domination of another industry, then use your monoply of the first to force a monopoly of the second.
Anti-Spyware didn't exist 5 years ago. Now it is a flourishing subscription business. This will be the kicker that starts MS as a provider of interlinked services. Office requires Windows requires MS AV requires MS AS requires MS whatever else. And keep up the pressure on the OEMs, schools and governments that are selling MS Windows + Office for them. Once you've got people over the hurdle of paying monthly for software, you can do anything.
You gotta admire them. It's beautiful in a sick kinda way.
It's just another guy who has made the mistake of being unlucky with a big service provider. ADSL changeover is always pretty painful but its no exception.
You try doing anything with your local council, water, electricity or gas suppliers (in any country) beyond passively transferring money to them and receiving their service.
As soon as anything goes wrong, book yourself in for weeks of service downtime, telephone calls and hassle.
I know someone who works for a TRANSCO contractor that actually blew up someones house on a routine call. No exaggeration. If there had been anyone inside, people would have gone down for manslaughter.
Also, digital decoder boxes will crash in price once a realistic cut off approaches, or there are channels worth having that are only available on digital. In the UK, you can buy decoder boxes in your local supermarket for under £40 - that's about $70 I think. Well in the affordable range for Average Joe, when it gives you an extra 30 channels for the price of 3 months basic Sky.
Don't take this as a flame - I have read your other posts and I think we have the similar opinions.
I totally agree with you that schools _should_ teach Windows, MacOS and Unix-like systems, as well as computing basics, document creation basics, and so on.
I don't agree that this _is_ done. It may be done in your school; your area; even your country. It is not done in the UK, except in rare situations. Students are specifically taught the use of Microsoft products to the exclusion of anything else - they graduate from high school believing there are no alternatives. Computing fundamentals consist of 'This is the magic box that comes with Windows and Office on. Where do you want to go today?'
I know this by working and socialising with people across the spectrum, teachers, it support staff, high level administrators, even students.
Perhaps a more accurate comparison would be if the RAF turned out pilots who believe all aircraft are made by one manufacturer.
Buggy drivers is a lovely one, cos on windows, that usually means new hardware. I had this for a long time, a Win XP box that was doing NAT at my house used to BSOD on a daily basis because of faulty ADSL modem drivers - and the manufacturer refused to release new ones. In the end, I gave up, and put the machine on FC2, with the drivers made by the great guys over at http://www.eciadsl.flashtux.org/. Since then it has been online for (checks) 142 days.
This is actually bang on the nail. I got that one, in the day when I'd not had my own computer long and thought viruses only happened to stupid people (they do, and I was one of them). Fortunately I wasn't dumb enough to ignore backups, so I had my data, but I bought NAV 2000 or whatever it was called then off the web that same night, and I've never run a machine without anti-virus since (although I use AVG now).
So the theory works. It's like immunisation - a small dose to build up anti-bodies.
Exactly! plus I believe in following the law carefully, but I find it too complex and too expensive to use propriety software.
Much more importantly though, I don't feel safe using products such as IE, and I fear for the safety my family and friends on the internet. I gave my fiance a computer for christmas - I built it myself and installed Fedora Core 2 for her; she's very happy with it, and I am relaxed since she has a reliable, secure computer.
Plus a lot of F/L/OS software is just better than the alternatives - Apache and Firefox are just better, and gaim, openoffice and gimp are better value for money than trillian, ms office and photoshop.
In this case, Microsoft is trying to introduce a new format that noone has adopted yet. I don't think it's going to fly - people have too much invested in Adobe's PDF and PS formats. In the case of MSN messenger, Microsoft tryed to introduce a new service that no-one had adopted yet. You wouldn't think it would fly - people had too much invested in ICQ and AIM's services incompatible services. Even in the case of Windows 'zip folders', where they made a dire abortion of it, people use it all the time.
Bundling is the ultimate promotion. Windows itself owes its total monopoly to being bundled with almost every computer and windows training being bundled with every education and every job. Can you imagine how many copies they would sell without that? yeah, exactly.
Microsoft is being very cruel to Adobe with this. PDFs make up a large amount of their brand presence to the man on the street (or more importantly, the PHB with purchasing power). Now they are down, I wonder if they will kick them in the teeth with a decent image editor? Since 90% of photoshop licenses are used for resizing jpegs for the company website once in a blue moon, adobe will relegated to a 'specialist' very quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
People buy windows *because* it comes with the goodies already there, it just works.
Nonsense. People buy windows because their school taught them it, their workplace uses it, their friends use it, their last computer had it, and almost every computer on the market comes with it pre-installed. Oh and most commercial software is designed for windows alone.
In fact, many clueless users are are outraged their expensive hardware _doesn't_ allow them to do basic tasks out of the box. E.g. many people buy machines under the assumption that one with a DVD drive will allow the playback of DVDs out of the box.
howstuffworks does have a lot of commercially type stuff on it.
try openoffice: at one end you get the openoffice dev sites, at the other end... staroffice. kinda slick.
The 51st state is unimpressed to be described as 'Third World'. After all, you're copying our population surveillance techniques, not the other way round.
You'll be calling us terrorists next.
Too right. In some cases, the industry can learn to to work together to a benificial end - a good example is the number of open INXs which make the net possible (or at least cheaper).
What it required here is an anti-spammer coalition, requiring at least 2 major email providers (yahoo & microsoft would be good), to work with VISA and Mastercard to shut down the spammers fast. By filtering truely huge amounts of mail, the coalition could be the first on the scene when a new phishing/spammer site appears. Making a transaction with a valid credit card number could then flag the spammer to VISA, who can instantly revoke the sellers merchant ID, and the flood of lusers signing up for AD0BE, M1CR0S0FT, V11111AGGRRRRR! would watch their transactions bounce. thus eductating both spammer and spamee alike, and making the world a better place.
I wonder if someone could post a checklist of why this won't work?
The odds are against you generating a real credit card number. The system is designed that way as a security measure. The set of valid numbers is some huge multiple of the issued cards, and when you tie that in with the necessity of providing valid supporting information...
anyway, if you could do that, then you could expect to see people brute forcing amazon's payment system in the same way.
From TFA:
To be sure, a few open source companies are successfully generating revenue and even (possibly) profits. But none of them generates enough money to do anything really innovative, says McVoy, 43, an industry veteran who has developed operating system software at Sun Microsystems, SGI and Google.
Of course, having working at Google, he would know what a curse open source is. No wonder Google make no money with all that OSS they use (and create).
True innovation is rare amongst computer software, and none of the big players can claim much. Microsoft and Oracle for example, made their millions from tweaking and marketing the ideas of others. Can anyone tell me if BitKeeper contains any innovations?
It's not a curse of open source, just the way things are made.
Not that these things matter, since Free software is about making good software available to everyone, not about innovations.
If you want some constructive feedback:
the html version of your book, the table of contents links appear to link to the wrong chapters, at least for me (Firefox 1.0.2 on Fedora Core 3).
I'm gonna read your book.
No such thing as too much information, just information which is badly organised.
I am connected to a web with a lot of gigabytes of data - the Internet. It's a lot of data, but with the right tools and knowledge, it's not useless.
It's when you factor in using the wrong tools, lack of knowledge and malicious attempts to attract your attention that you get information overload.
It's an overrated buzzword anyway. It seems to be most used for the same reason the previous generation complained about the pace of life being quicker these days.
That web page you metioned renders horrendously in Firefox 1.0.1 (Linux)....
I see large initial caps on the section headings, which intefere with the readability, but otherwise the site seems clean, uncluttered and attractive to me. That's on Windows 2000 with Firefox 1.0.3.
I have one other bugbear, which I can't blame this site for above others: I dislike the use of compressed date formats except where necessary - Monday 16th May 2005 would fit easily and neatly, and it takes my brain much less time to parse than 2005-05-16. That might just be me though.
I don't want them to see my site the way they want to see it. I want them to see it the way it was meant to be seen.
That's why GreaseMonkey exists. It allows firefox to do the work your eyes and hands must otherwise do - it gets you the information you're after, not what the designer fancies.
(I actually like your site design, and I think it is great you are releasing your work under the GPL and your content under a CC license)
If other articles are drawing notice to free registration for articles such as the NYT, why is this one linking to an article trying to charge $34?
Not only an incentive to produce bugs, but a proof of concept. A business model for the future. Create an entire industry from nothing by domination of another industry, then use your monoply of the first to force a monopoly of the second.
Anti-Spyware didn't exist 5 years ago. Now it is a flourishing subscription business. This will be the kicker that starts MS as a provider of interlinked services. Office requires Windows requires MS AV requires MS AS requires MS whatever else. And keep up the pressure on the OEMs, schools and governments that are selling MS Windows + Office for them. Once you've got people over the hurdle of paying monthly for software, you can do anything.
You gotta admire them. It's beautiful in a sick kinda way.
And not even mirrordot can cope with the load.
Try the nyud.net mirror instead. Works for me.
It's just another guy who has made the mistake of being unlucky with a big service provider. ADSL changeover is always pretty painful but its no exception.
You try doing anything with your local council, water, electricity or gas suppliers (in any country) beyond passively transferring money to them and receiving their service.
As soon as anything goes wrong, book yourself in for weeks of service downtime, telephone calls and hassle.
I know someone who works for a TRANSCO contractor that actually blew up someones house on a routine call. No exaggeration. If there had been anyone inside, people would have gone down for manslaughter.
Also, digital decoder boxes will crash in price once a realistic cut off approaches, or there are channels worth having that are only available on digital. In the UK, you can buy decoder boxes in your local supermarket for under £40 - that's about $70 I think. Well in the affordable range for Average Joe, when it gives you an extra 30 channels for the price of 3 months basic Sky.
Don't take this as a flame - I have read your other posts and I think we have the similar opinions.
I totally agree with you that schools _should_ teach Windows, MacOS and Unix-like systems, as well as computing basics, document creation basics, and so on.
I don't agree that this _is_ done. It may be done in your school; your area; even your country. It is not done in the UK, except in rare situations. Students are specifically taught the use of Microsoft products to the exclusion of anything else - they graduate from high school believing there are no alternatives. Computing fundamentals consist of 'This is the magic box that comes with Windows and Office on. Where do you want to go today?'
I know this by working and socialising with people across the spectrum, teachers, it support staff, high level administrators, even students.
Perhaps a more accurate comparison would be if the RAF turned out pilots who believe all aircraft are made by one manufacturer.
Buggy drivers is a lovely one, cos on windows, that usually means new hardware. I had this for a long time, a Win XP box that was doing NAT at my house used to BSOD on a daily basis because of faulty ADSL modem drivers - and the manufacturer refused to release new ones. In the end, I gave up, and put the machine on FC2, with the drivers made by the great guys over at http://www.eciadsl.flashtux.org/. Since then it has been online for (checks) 142 days.
This is actually bang on the nail. I got that one, in the day when I'd not had my own computer long and thought viruses only happened to stupid people (they do, and I was one of them). Fortunately I wasn't dumb enough to ignore backups, so I had my data, but I bought NAV 2000 or whatever it was called then off the web that same night, and I've never run a machine without anti-virus since (although I use AVG now).
So the theory works. It's like immunisation - a small dose to build up anti-bodies.
I've said this on slashdot and elsewhere many times before but there's always a new example.
Our schools should be teaching our children to use operating sytems, word processors, spreadshees and databases NOT Windows, Word, Excel and Access.
Do they teach them to use Bics, Black & Deckers, or Dells? No, they teach writing, woodwork, and computers.
These kids need to learn essential skills not essential marketing.
At least now Jobs has something valid to complain about MS copying them.
or was he just psychic?
Exactly! plus I believe in following the law carefully, but I find it too complex and too expensive to use propriety software.
Much more importantly though, I don't feel safe using products such as IE, and I fear for the safety my family and friends on the internet. I gave my fiance a computer for christmas - I built it myself and installed Fedora Core 2 for her; she's very happy with it, and I am relaxed since she has a reliable, secure computer.
Plus a lot of F/L/OS software is just better than the alternatives - Apache and Firefox are just better, and gaim, openoffice and gimp are better value for money than trillian, ms office and photoshop.
So if anyone wants a checklist:
- Safety
- Compatability
- Quality
- Price
From my reading of the grandparent, he got two domain names
Domain 1 in the form yourchoice.newextension
Domain 2 in the form yourchoice.newextension.cn
Domain 1 is not a regular domain at all.
Domain 2 is a subdomain of one belonging to this new registrar.
I imagine the plugin is required for the new extension to work, in the same way as those con-artists over at new.net do it.
In this case, Microsoft is trying to introduce a new format that noone has adopted yet. I don't think it's going to fly - people have too much invested in Adobe's PDF and PS formats.
In the case of MSN messenger, Microsoft tryed to introduce a new service that no-one had adopted yet. You wouldn't think it would fly - people had too much invested in ICQ and AIM's services incompatible services.
Even in the case of Windows 'zip folders', where they made a dire abortion of it, people use it all the time.
Bundling is the ultimate promotion. Windows itself owes its total monopoly to being bundled with almost every computer and windows training being bundled with every education and every job. Can you imagine how many copies they would sell without that? yeah, exactly.
Microsoft is being very cruel to Adobe with this. PDFs make up a large amount of their brand presence to the man on the street (or more importantly, the PHB with purchasing power). Now they are down, I wonder if they will kick them in the teeth with a decent image editor? Since 90% of photoshop licenses are used for resizing jpegs for the company website once in a blue moon, adobe will relegated to a 'specialist' very quickly.
It's clearly biased towards Internet Explorer too, the results I get back in Firefox are mostly irrelevant blogs and pages full of adverts.