The free OO is very expensive if you use it to actually do work(what a concept). If OO just burned up an extra 10 minutes a day for my users by being buggy or quirky, that would cost me $60,000 per user(users bill at $150/hour)!!!! I think $500 for a copy of office 2003 is cheap!
If they spent an extra 10 minutes a day, wouldn't it mean that they'd bill their clients an extra 60,000$? Making the company richer.
Cost to install is not the only cost. With a free product, your own IT guys are the only resource if you encounter a bug or difficult error situation. If you're paying for a license, you have another level of support, i.e. the developer.
It has been said many times before, and better than I could, but:
When you find a bug in a Microsoft product, can you really get hold of the programmers? Is the helpdesk really helpful? Are Microsoft products (Office, in this case) really more bug-free than the major alternatives?
I has also been said that it's often a lot easier to just email or call the OSS programmers and to talk directly to the person who coded the app you are using, and suggestions for new features have more chances of being listened to in the OSS world.
1. 'Piracy' is a term that is used to describe, in fewer words, the illegal redistribution of copyrighted material. It is SYNONYMOUS with copyright infringement. This is why being a pedantic assclown is never a good idea. Eventually you're going to run across a word that has two meanings, and your puny human brain will implode trying to parse it.
"Piracy" is a word that has many meanings and a pejorative sub-text, "copyright infringement" is precise and neutral.
login to the blogger account, and if you are amongst the selected - there will be a message to indicate an 'invite to try gmail' on the right side of the screen.
That's indeed how it was for me; strange thing is, that invitation is still there now that I've joined gmail.
You can't create more than one account, though (well, maybe I can cheat somehow but I haven't put too much effort into it).
Sounds like every jackass liberal arts professor I had while attending Uni. I think they were bitter that they needed to get a PhD to get anywhere with their worthless area of study.
The standards of public conduct are different the world over. A government has the responsibility to enforce what its citizens feel is appropriate. Now, the government should not *define* what is appropriate, the citizens should. Thus if the majority of people in saudi arabia feel a web site contravenes prevailing standards, then yes, the government would be right in 'banning' it. Hopefully the people are well enough informed to make a proper decision here.
I strongly disagree.
Governments maybe be elected by the majority (where there is actual elections, unlike in Saudi Arabia), but they are there to represent and protect everybody, not just said majority.
That's where the concept of human rights exists, though. I guess that in some places they could actually consider freedom of speech a hurtful thing and in good faith - from their point of view - restrict it "for the good of everybody".
You are right that Freenet is very frustrating to use, but I'd rather that something like it exists and be developped so that when we start to really need it, the kinks have been worked out. That's why I run a node although I don't actually browse freenet; it's a kind of donation to what I believe is a worthy project.
It's the same everywhere, really. The first people who bought hybrid cars didn't get machines that worked as well, were as fast and efficient as those we have today (have you seen the 2004 Prius? or the 2004 Civic Hybrid? And soon there'll be Accords and Camrys) and they had to pay a higher price/deal with more problems, uglier designs, etc.
Same with the people who buy version/revision 1.0 of video cards, motherboards, etc. More bugs, higher priced, etc.
But without the early versions, we wouldn't get the killer apps later on.
I'm sure that better routing/whatever will be developped for freenet, and with bandwidth and storage becoming cheaper all the time, the network will be more efficient than it is now at equal number of nodes. It just takes time to get there... Of course there could be some theorical bottlenecks to the project that can't be easily solved without changing some of the fondamentals, but maybe that's possible too without compromising the goals too much.
Linux and FreeBSD can run very, very well on those old machines -- even as desktops with the right window manager. OS X may be pretty and all, but compared to Linux or FreeBSD it's an absolute dog.
Apple is a hardware company, so I think it's understandable that they make an OS that takes advantage of modern hardware and put less effort into supporting aging computers.
Besides, try running a recent KDE or Windows on a 200mhz computer. It's not like OS X is the only dog around...
As for microsoft and Apple, I guess it comes down to the fact that the companies that are trying to make money don't care that much about supporting *old* hardware.
Evidently you don't understand the meaning of the term "vocal minority". More people voting for Mozilla than for IE is exactly in line with what a vocal minority would do.
Something else to consider is that a lot of people don't read the discussions on/.
The people who do are usually the geekier kind, a higher ratio of which probably use Mozilla & co., so the poll isn't quite representative of slashdotters.
You do a good job at projecting an elitist attitude. This does nothing good for the open source movement...
I'm not a OSS politician; I don't care much for having a wooden tongue.
Anyway, I didn't mean it as in "mozilla users are intelligent", I meant it as in: "It's not because something is a minority that it's not worth supporting."
Online publication is sick of being slashdotted, news at eleven.
If I had some kind of content website I'd sure be happy about being slashdotted; isn't the whole point of having a website to get people to your content? The more the better?
A lot of people avoid AMD because of the heat, too. I will probably not buy another AMD after the XP2100 I got last year.
Well, I guess that you should avoid Intel too, since they have been running hotter than AMD for a while (especially the Athlon 64's with they frequence throttling tech) and I don't think your next purchase will be downgrading.
It's not even close to reasonable to assume that Jobs (as CEO of one public company) would give a break to another company of which he is a substantial stockholder.
That's a good point, actually. I hadn't thought about the fact that Apple was a public company.
They probably still get some kind of volume discount or something like that, though... no?
Slashdot Mirror
The free OO is very expensive if you use it to actually do work(what a concept). If OO just burned up an extra 10 minutes a day for my users by being buggy or quirky, that would cost me $60,000 per user(users bill at $150/hour)!!!! I think $500 for a copy of office 2003 is cheap!
If they spent an extra 10 minutes a day, wouldn't it mean that they'd bill their clients an extra 60,000$? Making the company richer.
Heh.
Cost to install is not the only cost. With a free product, your own IT guys are the only resource if you encounter a bug or difficult error situation. If you're paying for a license, you have another level of support, i.e. the developer.
It has been said many times before, and better than I could, but:
When you find a bug in a Microsoft product, can you really get hold of the programmers? Is the helpdesk really helpful? Are Microsoft products (Office, in this case) really more bug-free than the major alternatives?
I has also been said that it's often a lot easier to just email or call the OSS programmers and to talk directly to the person who coded the app you are using, and suggestions for new features have more chances of being listened to in the OSS world.
1. 'Piracy' is a term that is used to describe, in fewer words, the illegal redistribution of copyrighted material. It is SYNONYMOUS with copyright infringement. This is why being a pedantic assclown is never a good idea. Eventually you're going to run across a word that has two meanings, and your puny human brain will implode trying to parse it.
"Piracy" is a word that has many meanings and a pejorative sub-text, "copyright infringement" is precise and neutral.
login to the blogger account, and if you are amongst the selected - there will be a message to indicate an 'invite to try gmail' on the right side of the screen.
That's indeed how it was for me; strange thing is, that invitation is still there now that I've joined gmail.
You can't create more than one account, though (well, maybe I can cheat somehow but I haven't put too much effort into it).
Sounds like every jackass liberal arts professor I had while attending Uni. I think they were bitter that they needed to get a PhD to get anywhere with their worthless area of study.
Wow! Who's bitter now?
Add to that a geothermic pump and an hybrid car and that's what I call a real feel-good lifestyle!
The standards of public conduct are different the world over. A government has the responsibility to enforce what its citizens feel is appropriate. Now, the government should not *define* what is appropriate, the citizens should. Thus if the majority of people in saudi arabia feel a web site contravenes prevailing standards, then yes, the government would be right in 'banning' it. Hopefully the people are well enough informed to make a proper decision here.
I strongly disagree.
Governments maybe be elected by the majority (where there is actual elections, unlike in Saudi Arabia), but they are there to represent and protect everybody, not just said majority.
That's where the concept of human rights exists, though. I guess that in some places they could actually consider freedom of speech a hurtful thing and in good faith - from their point of view - restrict it "for the good of everybody".
You are right that Freenet is very frustrating to use, but I'd rather that something like it exists and be developped so that when we start to really need it, the kinks have been worked out. That's why I run a node although I don't actually browse freenet; it's a kind of donation to what I believe is a worthy project.
It's the same everywhere, really. The first people who bought hybrid cars didn't get machines that worked as well, were as fast and efficient as those we have today (have you seen the 2004 Prius? or the 2004 Civic Hybrid? And soon there'll be Accords and Camrys) and they had to pay a higher price/deal with more problems, uglier designs, etc.
Same with the people who buy version/revision 1.0 of video cards, motherboards, etc. More bugs, higher priced, etc.
But without the early versions, we wouldn't get the killer apps later on.
I'm sure that better routing/whatever will be developped for freenet, and with bandwidth and storage becoming cheaper all the time, the network will be more efficient than it is now at equal number of nodes. It just takes time to get there... Of course there could be some theorical bottlenecks to the project that can't be easily solved without changing some of the fondamentals, but maybe that's possible too without compromising the goals too much.
My 2 cents (canadian).
Allow me to refer you to your sig.
Actually, the default fonts that came with Slackware 9.1 are better than those I have on my windows box.
People are still buying from The SCO Group, aren't they?
No.
Linux and FreeBSD can run very, very well on those old machines -- even as desktops with the right window manager. OS X may be pretty and all, but compared to Linux or FreeBSD it's an absolute dog.
Apple is a hardware company, so I think it's understandable that they make an OS that takes advantage of modern hardware and put less effort into supporting aging computers.
Besides, try running a recent KDE or Windows on a 200mhz computer. It's not like OS X is the only dog around...
As for microsoft and Apple, I guess it comes down to the fact that the companies that are trying to make money don't care that much about supporting *old* hardware.
If you want fast, try Slackware.
It's fine as a desktop on my ancient K6-2 450mhz 192 megs RAM, with KDE 3.2.1 et Kernel 2.6.5.
I hear that Slackware is closer to classic Unix and BSD than most of the other big linux distros (Redhat, Debian, etc).
How hard do you think the migration to FreeBSD from Slackware would be?
If thats what a standard Athlon64 does to a EE P4, I'd love to see what, say, the AthlonFX-53 would be capable of...
IIRC, the Athlon FX is basically an Opteron and the P4 EE is a Xeon, so it says something about the server market too.
I have an ancient computer - a K6-2 450mhz with 192 megs of PC100 RAM - and Mandrake 9.1 was a dog on it.
Later I switched to Slackware and it was much faster. Then I upgraded to Kernel 2.6.x (currently 2.6.5) and KDE 3.2.x and things are even faster now.
I suppose that Mandrake is too big/bloated (depending on if you like it or not) for old computers.
Evidently you don't understand the meaning of the term "vocal minority". More people voting for Mozilla than for IE is exactly in line with what a vocal minority would do.
/.
Something else to consider is that a lot of people don't read the discussions on
The people who do are usually the geekier kind, a higher ratio of which probably use Mozilla & co., so the poll isn't quite representative of slashdotters.
You do a good job at projecting an elitist attitude. This does nothing good for the open source movement...
I'm not a OSS politician; I don't care much for having a wooden tongue.
Anyway, I didn't mean it as in "mozilla users are intelligent", I meant it as in: "It's not because something is a minority that it's not worth supporting."
Mozilla has a small marketshare, practically no one uses it, and finally Long Live IE!
True.
Intelligence also has a small marketshare...
Online publication is sick of being slashdotted, news at eleven.
If I had some kind of content website I'd sure be happy about being slashdotted; isn't the whole point of having a website to get people to your content? The more the better?
Keep your most valued files on your usb key.
And lose it.
That's the word I was after...
A lot of people avoid AMD because of the heat, too. I will probably not buy another AMD after the XP2100 I got last year.
Well, I guess that you should avoid Intel too, since they have been running hotter than AMD for a while (especially the Athlon 64's with they frequence throttling tech) and I don't think your next purchase will be downgrading.
No hits?
How do they call that... uh
There's a whole website for that kind of stuff.
Damn, I've forgotten what it's called!
It's not even close to reasonable to assume that Jobs (as CEO of one public company) would give a break to another company of which he is a substantial stockholder.
That's a good point, actually. I hadn't thought about the fact that Apple was a public company.
They probably still get some kind of volume discount or something like that, though... no?