I hear people swearing allegence to a particular brand of consumer Hard Drive all the time, but I don't buy it.
Sure, but if you'd actually read the parent post instead of having an emotional response to it, you'd see that he wasn't swearing allegience to a particular brand at all! The point was simply that his new (large) drive failed, while his old (small) drive has been working for years.
I would have to say that he is lucky though; those particular Maxtor drives (850 meg to 1.6 gig) are extremely failure prone.
You can't make blanket statements about one brand versus another, but you can take past data into consideration when buying a new drive. Some manufacturers have pretty consistent failure statistics (WDC, Seagate). Others produce good drives most of the time, but have bad spells from time to time that alienate a lot of customers (Maxtor, IBM, Fuji).
All it really comes down to is the level of honesty and support that you get from the company you buy from. IBM and Fuji show an astounding lack of good faith when it comes to dealing with quality problems. Maxtor, WDC, Seagate not only go out of their way to bring problems to their customers' attention, they also have advance RMA policies, even for OEM drives in the case of Maxtor and WDC, to get you back on your feet ASAP.
The vast majority of people found easier ways of enjoying their computers more.
They didn't "find" these ways though; they were developed as technology progressed. Once BBS systems became popular, it was easier to trade program listings via boards because only one person had to type them in to begin with. Once diskette drives were standard on most machines, magazines shipped cover disks or had magazine-on-disk publications like Softdisk or Big Blue Disk.
My point is, I doubt people were hand-entering code because that act in and of itself brought them some sort of perverse joy. At the time, hand-entering listings was simply what it took to get the code on their system so they could play with it.
Why rehash the same tired software? Introduce something NEW (for Microsoft to copy).
You might note that on a news site, the focus is probably on reporting news that people care about. Such as, much-requested features that have finally been implemented. Why should they report on every little detail, especially those that users might not even care about until they have used them and realize how powerful they are?
If Slashdot reported on any truly NEW features in Evolution, you'd have 200 replies from people saying "Why would I need to use XXX feature?" or "Why did they even bother?" or "What's a XXX?" So I think it's a good idea that they focus on reporting things that are relevant to the readership.
I think if you examine things objectively (e.g. look at the code yourself) you'd realize that there's a great deal more innovation going on in OSS projects than can be gathered at an immediate glance.
I guess I'm trying to say that there will always be a need for commercial software, regardless of what RMS says.
This is really silly. RMS and especially the "Open Source" world have never _once_ tried to limit the commercialization of software. The Open Source model, especially, is a _business model_ put forth by ESR's writing. What do you think Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, et. al. are? They're not a bunch of anti-capitalist hippies. They have built a business around distributing, supporting, and improving open source software.
Just because something is open source or even Free Software (as in GPL) does not mean it can't be commercialized. And OTOH, just because something is free-as-in-beer-ware does not mean that the user is free to do as he or she pleases with it.
Take your anti-RMS trolling elsewhere if you can't represent the facts properly.
it's very hipocritical to say "bah, law makers don't know squat about computers" when criticizing the RIAA and MPAA, and then say "don't you think the evidence showed in court proves it".
I don't see where I said this. Also, legislators have very little to do with what goes on in the courtrooms that attempt to interpret their laws.
*Everyone* I know right now switched over and is still using IE over Netscape for the exact same reason.
This is silly. I know people who use Mozilla and/or Opera exclusively as well as alongside IE. I also know people who use IE and refuse to even consider "alternative" browsers. It's a personal choice. It also doesn't change the fact one bit that Microsoft used their desktop monopoly as a lever to acquire a browser monopoly. Very few people even know that other browsers exist, or even what a browser is. ("The internet? That's the blue E on my desktop!")
Netscape did the typical geek idealist thing of hoping that 'you build it they will come'.
Where as Moft sought alliance with other companies...
Microsoft bought Spyglass Software and integrated their browser into Windows. I don't see how that was an alliance, more than it was assimilation. Microsoft also refused to allow OEMs to install Netscape on the machines they built. If you can't even buy a computer with Netscape on it if you wanted to, but you get IE by default with the operating system, Netscape loses by default. What would be the chances of ANY company in that situation? Microsoft stacked the deck in their favor before it begun. Before you whine about capitalism this, capitalism that, note that attempting to expand a monopoly across product categories is ILLEGAL. If you believe that Microsoft should be above the law, then this discussion is pointless.
IBM's incompetence cannot be blamed on others, that's the bottom line.
You admit that Microsoft *should* have played fairly and not backstabbed them over OS/2, but do not criticize them for not doing so. If you're for dirty pool, say so. Otherwise, I don't see why Microsoft would be exempt from criticism.
Linux (w/ Redhat for example) entered on the same market that BeOS did.
Red Hat is giving away their product to end users, and targeting enterprises for volume sales where they can provide support contracts. BeOS was a desktop OS directly competing with desktop versions of Windows. Or at least, it would have competed with Windows; Microsoft's discriminatory OEM licensing never even allowed it the chance to compete on whatever technical merits it had, as no OEMs were allowed to even install it on machines they shipped. (Be eventually offered to give away the OS just to get OEM preinstall marketshare, but found that OEMs were unwilling to risk a breach of contract with Microsoft, even for a giveaway.) If you don't see a problem with a situation where third parties can't enter a market without completely giving away their product, then I don't know what to say. This is exactly the situation that antitrust law was meant to avoid.
all three of those companies were big and strong. They only fell so much harder.
IBM hasn't fallen. Netscape and Be, I don't see how you can even insinuate that they were ever "big and strong".
If anything, Microsoft raped small companies... *royally*. Not big ones.
Yep, and that's the problem. So why should we absolve them just because they've only hurt small companies and not taken down mega-goliaths? After all, their barriers to entry were designed to keep new competition from rising up and taking over market share. That's how an abusive monopoly works. They don't care what IBM does, because they can't control IBM; but they can put a startup out of business overnight.
Get your priorities straight... we're not talking about your neighbour's kid here that got hurt
My priorities are that I want a fair and free marketplace and choice for consumers. If you disagree with those priorities, there is no more argument here.
Win32 being similar to OS/2 is as irrelevant as Linux being similar to UNIX in this conversation.
Is that so? Where did the Linux developers have access to the source code of any proprietary UNIX operating system under a co-development agreement, and then take that code, change it slightly to be incompatible with UNIX, and sell it as their own proprietary product?
The g400 sucks under Linux. None of the hardware based accelerations are available.
Um, no offense, but WTF are you talking about? I play hardware-accelerated games all the time with my G400. I'd like you to name a better open-source driver set than Matrox's.
Dipshit troll. He did not say you had to know how to recompile software to use a free operating system, merely that the possibility exists with Free Software for you to do so, if you would ever have a reason to.
For most people, it's time to move beyond the current computer paradigm of OS + Applications + Internet + File System....
Go ahead, nobody's stopping you. However, don't expect me to be impressed with it, much less adopt it, unless it does more for me than fill my ear with marketing babble.
The OS wars are largely over.
To this I say: you ain't seen nothing yet. The OS wars are not over until Microsoft has its proprietary stranglehold removed; whether it takes a few years or many, computing is not going to progress until the MS monoculture is broken up, and some real fresh ideas can enter the market. What's best for Microsoft is not what's best for progressing the science of computing.
Hey, why don't *you* prove that Microsoft did have a negative impact. And STFU if it's going to be saying that Nutscrape's sales went down...
Um sure... Win95 appeared on the market with IE included with it. Later, Microsoft required OEMs not to remove IE from the machine, or breach their OEM contract. Finally, Microsoft intertwined IE with the guts of Windows in an attempt to make it inseparable (and failed at that). Netscape's sales started to decline in 1995 until they were vaporized by 1997 and giving away their browser so that they could make money off branding.
This is a textbook example of why *bundling is ILLEGAL* when you have a monopoly, which Microsoft did by 1995. If they didn't, Netscape would have had a market in the non-bundling vendors. But Microsoft was a single entity that controlled access to nearly every PC in existence, and they used that to shut Netscape out of the browser market. In addition to the real-world evidence, there were examples of Microsoft memos outlining their anticompetitive behavior presented in the courtroom. I can't think of how one would possibly counter-argue this.
Netscape 4 is one of the buggiest pieces of software out there. It's hell to develop for, and it's hell to use.
Try developing for IE circa 1997 when Netscape 4 was released. (It was IE 3.0 at the time.) CSS didn't exist then, and Javascript was a laughable hack. Comparing NS4 to modern browsers on technical merit is a joke.
(For crying out loud, it reloads a page when you resize the fucker) -- are you going to deny this? -- and if so, you don't even deserver being replied to.
That's funny, considering that I *would* deny that, and I would be correct. NS4 had poor CSS support (due to the standard hardly existing at the time). The reason that some web sites reload when you resize them is because of Javascript that has been placed there by the developer, in order to work around the CSS bugs.
Saying that OS2 was struck by Microsoft is equivalent to saying McDonalds is being hurt by Burger King. Get real. Get FUCKING REAL.
How can you be so inflammatory when you know nothing? Microsoft co-developed OS/2 with IBM up to version 2.0 (in fact, it was known as Microsoft OS/2 before that time), and they bailed from the project in 1991. That didn't stop them from taking HPFS from OS/2 and renaming it to NTFS, using the OS/2 bootloader, modeling the Win32 API in NT 3.1 and the executable format after OS/2's, etc etc.
IBM marketed OS/2 like shit, and Microsoft took advantage of IBM's co-operation with them in the early days. It was dirty pool.
Yes, you might argue that all's fair in business, so I'll remind you of that next time you drop a $100 bill, and I keep it instead of bringing it back to you.
I'm not sure what your snippet about BeOS is supposed to prove to me. BeOS never had a chance because Microsoft's licensing agreements didn't allow OEMs to even load a secondary operating system on any computer they ship. It didn't even have the *chance* to compete on any technical merits it might have had; it was doomed before it ever came to market. This is why monopolies are bad -- they are black holes that suck in anything that comes near them and either assimilate it or destroy it if it's undesirable or uncooperative.
There is no proof in the market.
Yes, but there is plenty of proof in courtrooms. Don't follow antitrust trials much, I gather?
Now you sir, are entitled to STFU, or provide something in return!
Be, Nutscrap and OS/2 all shot themselves in the foot. They can thank the existence of microsoft, because frankly, if Moft wasn't there, they'd still go down in flames, and have nobody to blame it on.
Please provide specific examples to back up your claim. Be sure to point out how Microsoft's discriminatory OEM licensing and illegal bundling did not actually have a vast negative effect on these companies.
People have long since using computers for the sake of the OS (well, except for OSS zealots).
Uh-huh. Tell that to Solaris admins, who believe Sun's platform is the best for high-demand servers. Or to people doing heavy-duty scientific work that buy SGI machines so they can run IRIX and do seamless clustering with ease. Or "OSS zealots" who prefer an OS that they can be free to tinker with and improve.
Your stereotyping of people having a preference in the OS they use as "zealots" is childish and myopic.
A Taiwanese OEM builds their mice. Microsoft supplies the logo that the OEM prints on each mouse, and Microsoft sells the mice through their distributors. Nothing more.
Until the day when Linux supports any and every piece of hardware the day it's released, the installations can be done my grandma, and all software hits store shelves in both Windows and Linux version on the same day, Linux will never be a contender for the desktop market.
One day you'll be grateful for the work that people are doing today and, for the most part, giving away. That day will be when you decide that you no longer want your computing practices controlled by an entity who started taking its customers for granted long ago, and who squashes any potential choices that may arise at every turn.
In the meantime, it only makes you look like a whining ass to criticize others for producing "lame ports, emulation, or cheesy rip-offs". What you gain with free software is freedom. If you choose not to take that road now, suit yourself. But don't tear others down for providing it, and suggesting reasons why others should help them provide it.
One day, it will matter to you; on that day, you'll be thankful that so many people threw themselves in the face of impossible mindshare barriers, including open criticism such as yours, just so they could create something that everyone can benefit from.
Then why GPL at all? I'm sure the community has disassemblers, debuggers, emulators and logic analyzers to dissect the interface.
This is not the case. Companies can afford special equipment because they have capital gains to reap from using it properly. The general public most certainly does not have the financial basis for access to this sort of equipment.
This is what necessitated the GPL in the first place -- too much proprietary systems and code, and not enough people and tools to sit around and reverse it all day.
The company's competitors will probably rip off their code and designs either way (whether it's open or closed), as overseas cloners have entire divisions dedicated to mapping silicon at the gate level and documenting disassembled code line by line.
However, if it's GPL, they still have a legal basis to go after those competitors, while providing the public with obvious benefits, and thus a real reason to buy their product over a competitor's.
A GPL software interface holds far more weight for me than commercial propaganda ever will, in terms of my desire to purchase a hardware product. I am certainly not alone.
If it's not going to lead to increased revenues for the company, it simply shouldn't be on the table.
Wow, way to be a dogmatically rational business suit. Maybe it hasn't occurred to you that profit can be reaped in other forms than maximizing immediate shareholder value?
For example, if I saw a company that was willing to work with the public, I'd be way more likely to buy that company's product, even if it was perceived to be inferior. Reason? I like to get my hands dirty, and I don't subscribe to the producer/consumer dogma. I like having control over the things I own.
You may disagree and say that you would only support the company that produces the (perceived) best product at the best price, but assuming that everyone should subscribe to those same rationale is a grave mistake.
Erm, please point out the patents you are referencing. Postscript and PDF have been around for a LONG time, so any patents from the 80's are near expiry anyway.
Anyway, the problem lies when we all sell stock in every other company and buy shares in MS instead, because we perceive them to be "better financed". This causes them to become even more "better financed" and wipe the floor with its competitors. Good for shareholders and executives, bad for customers, and bad for the industry.
Sometimes you have to take more into account than perceived gains that are purely rational. Individuals who only count beans and ignore everything else set everyone up for failure in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
Yoo hoo! Irony Nazi? Are you there?
LOL.
Bad command or file name
Why specify a path for a command that's built into the shell? :)
I would have to say that he is lucky though; those particular Maxtor drives (850 meg to 1.6 gig) are extremely failure prone.
You can't make blanket statements about one brand versus another, but you can take past data into consideration when buying a new drive. Some manufacturers have pretty consistent failure statistics (WDC, Seagate). Others produce good drives most of the time, but have bad spells from time to time that alienate a lot of customers (Maxtor, IBM, Fuji).
All it really comes down to is the level of honesty and support that you get from the company you buy from. IBM and Fuji show an astounding lack of good faith when it comes to dealing with quality problems. Maxtor, WDC, Seagate not only go out of their way to bring problems to their customers' attention, they also have advance RMA policies, even for OEM drives in the case of Maxtor and WDC, to get you back on your feet ASAP.
My point is, I doubt people were hand-entering code because that act in and of itself brought them some sort of perverse joy. At the time, hand-entering listings was simply what it took to get the code on their system so they could play with it.
If Slashdot reported on any truly NEW features in Evolution, you'd have 200 replies from people saying "Why would I need to use XXX feature?" or "Why did they even bother?" or "What's a XXX?" So I think it's a good idea that they focus on reporting things that are relevant to the readership.
I think if you examine things objectively (e.g. look at the code yourself) you'd realize that there's a great deal more innovation going on in OSS projects than can be gathered at an immediate glance.
Just because something is open source or even Free Software (as in GPL) does not mean it can't be commercialized. And OTOH, just because something is free-as-in-beer-ware does not mean that the user is free to do as he or she pleases with it.
Take your anti-RMS trolling elsewhere if you can't represent the facts properly.
Dipshit troll. He did not say you had to know how to recompile software to use a free operating system, merely that the possibility exists with Free Software for you to do so, if you would ever have a reason to.
This is a textbook example of why *bundling is ILLEGAL* when you have a monopoly, which Microsoft did by 1995. If they didn't, Netscape would have had a market in the non-bundling vendors. But Microsoft was a single entity that controlled access to nearly every PC in existence, and they used that to shut Netscape out of the browser market. In addition to the real-world evidence, there were examples of Microsoft memos outlining their anticompetitive behavior presented in the courtroom. I can't think of how one would possibly counter-argue this.
Try developing for IE circa 1997 when Netscape 4 was released. (It was IE 3.0 at the time.) CSS didn't exist then, and Javascript was a laughable hack. Comparing NS4 to modern browsers on technical merit is a joke. That's funny, considering that I *would* deny that, and I would be correct. NS4 had poor CSS support (due to the standard hardly existing at the time). The reason that some web sites reload when you resize them is because of Javascript that has been placed there by the developer, in order to work around the CSS bugs. How can you be so inflammatory when you know nothing? Microsoft co-developed OS/2 with IBM up to version 2.0 (in fact, it was known as Microsoft OS/2 before that time), and they bailed from the project in 1991. That didn't stop them from taking HPFS from OS/2 and renaming it to NTFS, using the OS/2 bootloader, modeling the Win32 API in NT 3.1 and the executable format after OS/2's, etc etc. IBM marketed OS/2 like shit, and Microsoft took advantage of IBM's co-operation with them in the early days. It was dirty pool. Yes, you might argue that all's fair in business, so I'll remind you of that next time you drop a $100 bill, and I keep it instead of bringing it back to you.I'm not sure what your snippet about BeOS is supposed to prove to me. BeOS never had a chance because Microsoft's licensing agreements didn't allow OEMs to even load a secondary operating system on any computer they ship. It didn't even have the *chance* to compete on any technical merits it might have had; it was doomed before it ever came to market. This is why monopolies are bad -- they are black holes that suck in anything that comes near them and either assimilate it or destroy it if it's undesirable or uncooperative.
Yes, but there is plenty of proof in courtrooms. Don't follow antitrust trials much, I gather? Acknowledged, over.Otherwise, STFU please.
Your stereotyping of people having a preference in the OS they use as "zealots" is childish and myopic.
A Taiwanese OEM builds their mice. Microsoft supplies the logo that the OEM prints on each mouse, and Microsoft sells the mice through their distributors. Nothing more.
In the meantime, it only makes you look like a whining ass to criticize others for producing "lame ports, emulation, or cheesy rip-offs". What you gain with free software is freedom. If you choose not to take that road now, suit yourself. But don't tear others down for providing it, and suggesting reasons why others should help them provide it.
One day, it will matter to you; on that day, you'll be thankful that so many people threw themselves in the face of impossible mindshare barriers, including open criticism such as yours, just so they could create something that everyone can benefit from.
Please, please, please mod this up. I wish I had mod points today.
This is what necessitated the GPL in the first place -- too much proprietary systems and code, and not enough people and tools to sit around and reverse it all day.
The company's competitors will probably rip off their code and designs either way (whether it's open or closed), as overseas cloners have entire divisions dedicated to mapping silicon at the gate level and documenting disassembled code line by line.
However, if it's GPL, they still have a legal basis to go after those competitors, while providing the public with obvious benefits, and thus a real reason to buy their product over a competitor's.
A GPL software interface holds far more weight for me than commercial propaganda ever will, in terms of my desire to purchase a hardware product. I am certainly not alone.
For example, if I saw a company that was willing to work with the public, I'd be way more likely to buy that company's product, even if it was perceived to be inferior. Reason? I like to get my hands dirty, and I don't subscribe to the producer/consumer dogma. I like having control over the things I own.
You may disagree and say that you would only support the company that produces the (perceived) best product at the best price, but assuming that everyone should subscribe to those same rationale is a grave mistake.
Erm, please point out the patents you are referencing. Postscript and PDF have been around for a LONG time, so any patents from the 80's are near expiry anyway.
Anyway, the problem lies when we all sell stock in every other company and buy shares in MS instead, because we perceive them to be "better financed". This causes them to become even more "better financed" and wipe the floor with its competitors. Good for shareholders and executives, bad for customers, and bad for the industry.
Sometimes you have to take more into account than perceived gains that are purely rational. Individuals who only count beans and ignore everything else set everyone up for failure in the long run.