But if it's Open Source, won't that make it trivial to crack? (Heh, heh -- nice try, though.)
Re:What is the *source* of the "RMS" controversy?
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Stallman Goes to India
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Amen, Brother. You've pretty well nailed it.
OTOH, I think folks from other countries underestimate the yearning among sizable numbers of Americans to create an alternative to the money-grubbing culture. Unfortunately -- and you are quite right in this -- the penalties for straying from the offical line are absolutley horrific relative to, say, western Europe. Here in our winner-take-all society, if you don't pay attention to monetary rewards, you risk ending up in life-destroying, soul-sucking poverty. Our rulers have some very serious sticks to beat us with.
To me, at least, I don't care so much that a lot of stuff is built into the MS OS. Not many people complain that Apple's levels of integration are even higher than MS's. (OTOH, OS X probably doesn't break if you decide for some reason to trash all the Apple apps.) Given a choice, I'd rather that MS's formats -- as well as everyone else's -- be fully documented and freely available to all. OSS is already there, of course.
The user experience with a well-integrated operating system and it's many layers of applications and services (think Macintosh) is a joy for most people -- and the lack of that polish is the real sticking point for the Linux world at present, IMO. What's really puzzling to me is that, for all the integration of the MS desktop, it's such a crappy experience. With MS you get the worst of both worlds: resistance to true interoperability and poorly executed integration.
Where does this notion come that any human activity other than programming computers is second-rate and only worthy of scorn? The "end-user" is not always some stupid moron. In fact, this vast category of "end-users" will display the usual bell curve for logical intelligence (the usual measuring rod for computer aptitude). That means that a lot of people using computers but who are not programmers will also be extremely intelligent -- but they have other tasks toward which they prefer to devote their intelligence. There are only so many hours in the day, after all.
There are also other people who, while scoring low on logical intelligence, score extremely high on social intelligence, kinetic intelligence, musical intelligence, etc. These people are just as talented as any UNIX programmer, only in another domain.
Are all these people, regardless of their intelligence in whatever domain, unworthy of being offered a computer experience that is straightforward and consistent? Must the whole world become programmers at a professional level? Because that's the underlying message of a lot of the RTFM crowd.
There's a reason so many creative people gravitate toward the Macintosh, with its (theoretically, at least) "every program works like every other program" paradigm. They simply have other things to do with their lives than read "man" pages on building drivers, thousand-page tomes on UNIX programming, and memorizing 15 different and sometime contradictory GUIs and keyboard command sets.
The next time you are being given an injection by a nurse, enjoying a dance performance, or benefiting from the skills of an office peacemaker, remember that they are also computer users. If that nurse spent all of her time programming the myriad instruments she uses to monitor your health, she probably wouldn't have time to actually... well, monitor your health -- probably wouldn't even pay attention to all the nonverbal (and non-instrument) cues that tell her how you are doing.
It takes all kinds of people to make a world. We all need each other. Non-programmers need programmers to give us these potentially marvelous tools. Programmers need other programmers to create tools that are useful for programmers. And someone must intervene between the programmer and the "end user" to ensure that these tools are actually useful to a general population. (Hence the Macintosh, as Joel pointed out.) And you, Mr. Programmer Guru, need nurses and dancers and musicians and cooks and, well, friends and family who's skills are in being your friend and your family. It's not a question of which culture is superior. It's more: how can the best of all cultures mesh?
The problem isn't WMP or IE per se. It's the fact that most people buy a computer with Windows pre-installed. Microsoft has mega mindshare.
When Joe Sixpack wants to [fill in the blank: play music, watch his p0rn video, whatever], his first thought is: where's that on the menu. He sees Microsoft Windows Media Player. Okay, he can understand that and it says Microsoft. It probably looks and works like Word or IE. He feels safe. He doesn't want the best -- doesn't have the experience and expertise to make that judgement -- he just wants the least hassle.
Until Linux comes pre-installed on computers in a big way -- or young people begin to encounter Linux setups in grade school on up and thus get conditioned with a Linux mindshare -- it won't matter what alternatives to MS bundled software are out there for PC users. Human nature being what it is, people will look for what's comfortable. And most people are not geeks. They do other things that are also good and valuable.
On the other hand, when Linux distros do get pre-installed, they had better provide a similar level of comfort. Joe Sixpack doesn't want to read man pages to figure out that XMMS mean "X" (huh?) "MultiMedia System" and plays music ("...and why is it so tiny? I can barely click on those controls?!")
I don't see too many complaints about Apple's bundling of their very good iApps. Double standard? Yes. But Apple's not the 600 pound monopoly (though I bet they wish they were -- a benign dictator would still be a dictator, and their benignity is only an assumption on my part, not a given). Microsoft is the monopoly.
I agree with a previous poster, but for different reasons. Let Microsoft do whatever it wants. Bundling is not the battle space. The battle space is over the whole enchilada. Alternatives at the point of initial purchase. In a year or two, I think Linux distros will be fully there.
(This is what's so frustrating about the fact that Apple, as numerous posters have pointed out, will never release OS X for the Intel platform. As it stands, to use OS X you have to buy Apple hardware. Period. You have to commit to enter a completely different universe. That's a lot to ask a newbie computer user. It's like becoming a vegetarian or something. But three OS alternatives within the constant of the same hardware platform would be very interesting. --Oh, that's right; you can do that with a Mac!)
Bush doesn't necessarily want to get re-elected. (Arguably he wasn't actually elected to begin with.) He simply wants to retain power. I'm sure his team has concocted scenarios to retain power without an election. Yes, be not afraid, but be alert.
The notion that office workers are all happily exchanging their Microsoft files with no hassles isn't playing out in my world. The lack of compatability between various versions of office (including Publisher, and all the other miscellaneous crap) is a real PITA and a major productivity drain when you have to constantly ask people to save something they just sent you in an earlier format. Bleh.
In fairness, though, what happens as OpenOffice.org makes improvements to Writer, say, that necessitate changes to the.swx format? Or is there something about XML that obviates the problems we see with mixed versions of Word?
It was reported several months ago (sorry I can't find the exact article) that Apple is already working to promote X Serves for render farm use, and that Pixar is already testing X Serves for some of their imaging, but not using them in the render farm until a) they have amortized their recent investment in a Lintel render farm, and b) convince themselves that it offers some technical advantage (or at least parity). This could all have been a trial balloon, of course. But it seems even more of a possibility now that the G5 chip seems to be such a success, exactly as you are suggsting.
Do you have any verifiable source besides some radio mouth?
I live in Maine and there is nothing about this anywhere, nor on any of the numerous websites I've checked.
Put up or quit trolling!
Aaahh, XyWrite. With all due respect to vi, XyWrite will go down in history as the best pure writing instrument ever developed. Then IBM killed it (long story). I still use it, though.
Could be more of a hassle than it's worth down the line...
What with all of Microsoft's own compatibility issues with file formats and their many iterations, staying with MS office could be the biggest hassle of all.
This view has generally been true. I'm really curious what experience people are having with the new Intel Pentium M chips (aka Centrino when decked out with the wireless stuff) in laptops. Are they really cooler and do they use less power? In other words, do they now finally trump Apple's PPC laptops? I can imagine that the Vaio Z series would be a stylish competitor to a PowerBook -- but only if the CPU lived up to the hype. What's the word out there?
Nowhere did I say that Democrats don't take bribes. Of course they do. I'm from San Francisco where Mayor Willie Brown (D) has perfected the taking of bribes to a high art form! Interestingly, though, the Democrats are getting fewer bribes these days because they aren't in power, not because they are are more virtuous. On the other hand, I'm sure there are Republicans who would never take a bribe. Corruption, as well as virtue, is a bipartisan affair.
Your comment opens up a much larger discussion, however, about the appropriateness of corporations, with their disproportionately superior power relative to individuals and with interests often at odds with the public good, participating in politics. My view (and that of many others) is that corporations' claims to being legal "persons," with all the previleges that go to that status, is fictitous and needs to be remedied. The case precedent that made them "persons" came out of a historical period of high corruption on the bench and should never have been made. In any event, corporations are not giving money to candidates, who may one day vote on a piece of legislation of interest to said corporation, because they have some great interest in democracy. Corporate contributions are bribes, generally speaking. To think otherwise is naive.
Actually, this isn't just supposition. Entergy was part of the cabal that reamed Californians during that phoney energy crisis. And they are big contributors to Bush. To speculate that there is probably the usual corruption and abuse of power going on in Bush's hydrogen power strategy is not the same as opposing the science behind it. Safe nuke plants may well have a lot of merit. The question is, can corporate entities such as Entergy, who's ethics have demonstrably been a little lacking, be trusted to build new plants that are safe?
The conclusion to be drawn from your history lesson is that the Americans chose a violent course to address their grievances, while those who fled to Canada chose one of gradualist reform. So who has the better, more humane society today? Arguably it's Canada. While U.S. culture became habituated to reacting violently to every itch, Canada was quietly building a very nice civil society (and yes, it's not perfect). Doesn't appear that Canadians are too much troubled by the British Empire, either.
This is the old jobs-vs-the-environment issue. The long view is that without protecting the environment, the jobs will disappear anyway, but far into the future. But if you protect the environment immediately, how does a fisherman (logger, miner, etc.) feed his/her family? The reasonable solution is to create an alternate source of livelihood that a) meets the economic needs of those formerly involved in fishing but will be displaced, and b) does not simply recreate a new environmental disaster-in-the-wings (e.g. from over-fishing to, say, farmland conversion). Of course, such transitions are easy to dream up but almost impossible to implement. Bodies in motion tend to remain in motion, attachments to a way of life, and all that -- combined with selfishness and other reasons Diamond mentions. Plus, we don't tend to be taught good decision-making skills, individually or collectively. Good decisions almost seem to be a matter of luck (or intuition) rather than the application of skill.
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But if it's Open Source, won't that make it trivial to crack? (Heh, heh -- nice try, though.)
Amen, Brother. You've pretty well nailed it. OTOH, I think folks from other countries underestimate the yearning among sizable numbers of Americans to create an alternative to the money-grubbing culture. Unfortunately -- and you are quite right in this -- the penalties for straying from the offical line are absolutley horrific relative to, say, western Europe. Here in our winner-take-all society, if you don't pay attention to monetary rewards, you risk ending up in life-destroying, soul-sucking poverty. Our rulers have some very serious sticks to beat us with.
The user experience with a well-integrated operating system and it's many layers of applications and services (think Macintosh) is a joy for most people -- and the lack of that polish is the real sticking point for the Linux world at present, IMO. What's really puzzling to me is that, for all the integration of the MS desktop, it's such a crappy experience. With MS you get the worst of both worlds: resistance to true interoperability and poorly executed integration.
There are also other people who, while scoring low on logical intelligence, score extremely high on social intelligence, kinetic intelligence, musical intelligence, etc. These people are just as talented as any UNIX programmer, only in another domain.
Are all these people, regardless of their intelligence in whatever domain, unworthy of being offered a computer experience that is straightforward and consistent? Must the whole world become programmers at a professional level? Because that's the underlying message of a lot of the RTFM crowd.
There's a reason so many creative people gravitate toward the Macintosh, with its (theoretically, at least) "every program works like every other program" paradigm. They simply have other things to do with their lives than read "man" pages on building drivers, thousand-page tomes on UNIX programming, and memorizing 15 different and sometime contradictory GUIs and keyboard command sets.
The next time you are being given an injection by a nurse, enjoying a dance performance, or benefiting from the skills of an office peacemaker, remember that they are also computer users. If that nurse spent all of her time programming the myriad instruments she uses to monitor your health, she probably wouldn't have time to actually ... well, monitor your health -- probably wouldn't even pay attention to all the nonverbal (and non-instrument) cues that tell her how you are doing.
It takes all kinds of people to make a world. We all need each other. Non-programmers need programmers to give us these potentially marvelous tools. Programmers need other programmers to create tools that are useful for programmers. And someone must intervene between the programmer and the "end user" to ensure that these tools are actually useful to a general population. (Hence the Macintosh, as Joel pointed out.) And you, Mr. Programmer Guru, need nurses and dancers and musicians and cooks and, well, friends and family who's skills are in being your friend and your family. It's not a question of which culture is superior. It's more: how can the best of all cultures mesh?
When Joe Sixpack wants to [fill in the blank: play music, watch his p0rn video, whatever], his first thought is: where's that on the menu. He sees Microsoft Windows Media Player. Okay, he can understand that and it says Microsoft. It probably looks and works like Word or IE. He feels safe. He doesn't want the best -- doesn't have the experience and expertise to make that judgement -- he just wants the least hassle.
Until Linux comes pre-installed on computers in a big way -- or young people begin to encounter Linux setups in grade school on up and thus get conditioned with a Linux mindshare -- it won't matter what alternatives to MS bundled software are out there for PC users. Human nature being what it is, people will look for what's comfortable. And most people are not geeks. They do other things that are also good and valuable.
On the other hand, when Linux distros do get pre-installed, they had better provide a similar level of comfort. Joe Sixpack doesn't want to read man pages to figure out that XMMS mean "X" (huh?) "MultiMedia System" and plays music ("...and why is it so tiny? I can barely click on those controls?!")
I don't see too many complaints about Apple's bundling of their very good iApps. Double standard? Yes. But Apple's not the 600 pound monopoly (though I bet they wish they were -- a benign dictator would still be a dictator, and their benignity is only an assumption on my part, not a given). Microsoft is the monopoly.
I agree with a previous poster, but for different reasons. Let Microsoft do whatever it wants. Bundling is not the battle space. The battle space is over the whole enchilada. Alternatives at the point of initial purchase. In a year or two, I think Linux distros will be fully there.
(This is what's so frustrating about the fact that Apple, as numerous posters have pointed out, will never release OS X for the Intel platform. As it stands, to use OS X you have to buy Apple hardware. Period. You have to commit to enter a completely different universe. That's a lot to ask a newbie computer user. It's like becoming a vegetarian or something. But three OS alternatives within the constant of the same hardware platform would be very interesting. --Oh, that's right; you can do that with a Mac!)
For anything to change, everything has to change.
Bush doesn't necessarily want to get re-elected. (Arguably he wasn't actually elected to begin with.) He simply wants to retain power. I'm sure his team has concocted scenarios to retain power without an election. Yes, be not afraid, but be alert.
The notion that office workers are all happily exchanging their Microsoft files with no hassles isn't playing out in my world. The lack of compatability between various versions of office (including Publisher, and all the other miscellaneous crap) is a real PITA and a major productivity drain when you have to constantly ask people to save something they just sent you in an earlier format. Bleh. In fairness, though, what happens as OpenOffice.org makes improvements to Writer, say, that necessitate changes to the .swx format? Or is there something about XML that obviates the problems we see with mixed versions of Word?
It was reported several months ago (sorry I can't find the exact article) that Apple is already working to promote X Serves for render farm use, and that Pixar is already testing X Serves for some of their imaging, but not using them in the render farm until a) they have amortized their recent investment in a Lintel render farm, and b) convince themselves that it offers some technical advantage (or at least parity). This could all have been a trial balloon, of course. But it seems even more of a possibility now that the G5 chip seems to be such a success, exactly as you are suggsting.
Do you have any verifiable source besides some radio mouth? I live in Maine and there is nothing about this anywhere, nor on any of the numerous websites I've checked. Put up or quit trolling!
Aaahh, XyWrite. With all due respect to vi, XyWrite will go down in history as the best pure writing instrument ever developed. Then IBM killed it (long story). I still use it, though.
What with all of Microsoft's own compatibility issues with file formats and their many iterations, staying with MS office could be the biggest hassle of all.
Our university has just shut out all traffic from outside the system. That's almost as good as a DoS.
Now that I think about it, there does seem to be a resemblance between Bill Gates and Butters. Could Gates really be ... DR. CHAOS?!
This view has generally been true. I'm really curious what experience people are having with the new Intel Pentium M chips (aka Centrino when decked out with the wireless stuff) in laptops. Are they really cooler and do they use less power? In other words, do they now finally trump Apple's PPC laptops? I can imagine that the Vaio Z series would be a stylish competitor to a PowerBook -- but only if the CPU lived up to the hype. What's the word out there?
Nowhere did I say that Democrats don't take bribes. Of course they do. I'm from San Francisco where Mayor Willie Brown (D) has perfected the taking of bribes to a high art form! Interestingly, though, the Democrats are getting fewer bribes these days because they aren't in power, not because they are are more virtuous. On the other hand, I'm sure there are Republicans who would never take a bribe. Corruption, as well as virtue, is a bipartisan affair. Your comment opens up a much larger discussion, however, about the appropriateness of corporations, with their disproportionately superior power relative to individuals and with interests often at odds with the public good, participating in politics. My view (and that of many others) is that corporations' claims to being legal "persons," with all the previleges that go to that status, is fictitous and needs to be remedied. The case precedent that made them "persons" came out of a historical period of high corruption on the bench and should never have been made. In any event, corporations are not giving money to candidates, who may one day vote on a piece of legislation of interest to said corporation, because they have some great interest in democracy. Corporate contributions are bribes, generally speaking. To think otherwise is naive.
Actually, this isn't just supposition. Entergy was part of the cabal that reamed Californians during that phoney energy crisis. And they are big contributors to Bush. To speculate that there is probably the usual corruption and abuse of power going on in Bush's hydrogen power strategy is not the same as opposing the science behind it. Safe nuke plants may well have a lot of merit. The question is, can corporate entities such as Entergy, who's ethics have demonstrably been a little lacking, be trusted to build new plants that are safe?
Why is this posting even on here?! Not to be PC or anything, but this is beyond troll and into hate speech. Who the hell's moderating?
The conclusion to be drawn from your history lesson is that the Americans chose a violent course to address their grievances, while those who fled to Canada chose one of gradualist reform. So who has the better, more humane society today? Arguably it's Canada. While U.S. culture became habituated to reacting violently to every itch, Canada was quietly building a very nice civil society (and yes, it's not perfect). Doesn't appear that Canadians are too much troubled by the British Empire, either.
This is the old jobs-vs-the-environment issue. The long view is that without protecting the environment, the jobs will disappear anyway, but far into the future. But if you protect the environment immediately, how does a fisherman (logger, miner, etc.) feed his/her family? The reasonable solution is to create an alternate source of livelihood that a) meets the economic needs of those formerly involved in fishing but will be displaced, and b) does not simply recreate a new environmental disaster-in-the-wings (e.g. from over-fishing to, say, farmland conversion). Of course, such transitions are easy to dream up but almost impossible to implement. Bodies in motion tend to remain in motion, attachments to a way of life, and all that -- combined with selfishness and other reasons Diamond mentions. Plus, we don't tend to be taught good decision-making skills, individually or collectively. Good decisions almost seem to be a matter of luck (or intuition) rather than the application of skill.