If he had stuck to the "big issues" like software patents, he wouldn't be on the lunatic fringe. He got there by ranting about arcane minutiae like which license to use for libraries, why that license is called "lesser" instead of "library", why a certain kernel must always be prefixed with "GNU", why you shouldn't use tcl/tk, why the wheel group is evil, why unified driver ABIs are wrong, etc.
On some of those minutiae, he is correct. But when he argues them just as forcefully as he argues his beliefs against software patents and for copyleft, he affirms his place among the lunatic fringe.
Sometimes Bob can be so stupid! Actually, that's not fair. He could be just an incredibly bright person trolling for idiot readers.
It's entirely possible that Microsoft will never die. So what? The problem that people have with Microsoft is not they exist, but they have an inordinately large market share (monopoly) on certain classes of software goods. If Microsoft were reduced to a tiny mom-and-pop providing tech support in Redmond, they would not have died, but neither would anyone care about them anymore. The goal isn't to "kill" Microsoft, but to fracture that huge block of marketshare into nice competitive chunks.
The reason government can't seem to do anything about Microsoft, is because it wasn't the government that gave them their monopoly. The marketplace handed out that monopoly, so it's up to the marketplace to take it back.
Some people will say that because Microsoft now has that monopoly, the marketplace cannot do anything about it, and the government must do something instead. But there's not much the government can do to stop people from choosing Windows or MSOffice. Sure, the feds could start throwing users in jail, but that's not going to go over well come next election.
The marketplace can, and will, remove the monopolist crown from Microsoft. But it won't do it today. Everybody is looking for a quick solution, but there is no quick solution, because the Microsoft monopoly wasn't created overnight. It took them ten years to get it.
Maybe it will be Linux that drives them from the thrown. Maybe it will be the Mac. Or maybe the desktop itself will go away leaving Bill Gates the king of nothing. But it won't happen today, or this month, or even this year. So stop crying about it.
However, you don't have to use Windows today. You don't have to use MSOffice this month. You don't have to buy any Microsoft product this year. You have a choice. You might not want to exercise that choice, but it is still yours to make. You can use Linux today if you don't demand a perfect Windows clone. You can use OSX today if you don't demand commodity hardware. You also have the choices of FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD if you want a Free Software OS, or Solaris if free-beer is good enough. You can replace IExplorer with Mozilla, Opera, or Konqueror. You can replace MSOffice with OpenOffice. I won't even bother listing the dozens of suitable replacements for Media Player.
Microsoft might never die, but why should you care?
How these people propose to fund the building of the roads that they will march on in protest is unclear, but it's an interesting case they put forward from a legal point of view.
1) The income tax is not the only tax. Not by a long shot. The US didn't have an income tax until 1916, IIRC, but there were roads before then. Several US states don't have income taxes, but they all seem to have their own state road systems.
2) The law trumps the law. The case these people put forward may be legally sound, the law still says you have to pay income taxes. In fact, anything the government says you have to you, you have to do.
*nor* the new owner can legally use the software without a "transfer of ownership"
The sales (or donation) receipt is all that you need. In fact, you don't even need that. If you disagree, please show me the law where it says otherwise.
The software manufacturers may bitch about it, but the last time I checked, they were NOT the law.
Not to defend unsafe driving, but the reason that nearly everyone speeds is that many speed limits are set so such a low common denominator that you'd assume that brain-damaged chimpanzees were used as the baseline cases.
Except that we're talking San Fransisco here. This is the city where 99% of the drivers travel at 30MPH because the streets are packed, and 1% weave in and out of lanes at 60MPH because they don't care.
My grandma threw out all my father's Superman comics, going back to issue one, when enlisted in the marines in WWII. She figured he didn't need kiddy comic books anymore when he was off fighting in the pacific...
He used to tell me, "Son, if my Ma hadn't thrown out my Superone 1, I would be a rich man today. But since she did I can't afford a gardener, so GET OUT THERE AND MOW THE LAWN!"
I was going to reply with a thorough rebuttal of all of your points, including a detailed analysis of how many hundreds of gigabytes would be required to hold the statically linked versions of the packages I currently have installed (and how many days it would take to download them with a typical ADSL connection), but I decided better. I get the impression that you enjoy complaining, and any evidence that your complaints are groundless would only spoil the good mood you are in.
Sort of like my greenie friend who bitched at farmers and the lack of fuel emissions on their tractors, when he himself drove an "eco-friendly" Toyota that spewed blue smoke to commute fifty miles to work.
(but I'm sure his "caring" emotions more than compensated for his pollutomatic car)
Well if it weren't for the requirement "can take VB and convert", you would have a lot of options. VB needs to go away. People didn't use VB because of the language, they used it because you could write crappy throwaway programs and prototypes quickly. Using Python, Perl, Ruby, Delphi, Java and or even C++ underneath makes no difference, because 99% of the time the RAD developer isn't touching any code.
Frankly, the whole "programming for non-programmers" approach needs to be seriously rethought. It's good that marketing types can quickly make a mockup of an app, but they should never be led to believe that they can do the work of developers. One quarter million dollar realtime embedded product I work on was spec'd by marketing to use.NET. Without arguing one way or the other on the merits of.NET, one of the rationales for the decision was so that it would be easier to use Visual Basic. Huh?
Why install Linux on a SPARC? Heck, why install Linux on a PCfor that matter? Maybe we should all just listen to our corporate masters at Microsoft, Sun and Apple and do what they tell us!
If you're writing network code, sniffers make invaluable debugging tools. You don't put sniffers in the software, because they are more valuable as stand alone tools, and problems usually arise out of the interaction of multiple applications. Should each of them have their own sniffer?
I'm not sure why they decided to drop the true third button from this model
Because some marketing puke at Logitech decided that no one used three buttons anyway, and so dropped it, but then introduced several new lines with five, six and seven buttons.
I hate scrollwheels, but I can understand why some people want them. "Click on the scrollbar? That's like so 90's!" But why can they make a mouse/trackball with a choice? Pop off the wheel and pop on a button!
Ditto. Except I have even an older model (three button, no scroll). In my opinion it's even more ergonomic because it has a flatter shape you can rest your hand on without the need to "grip" it. I bought three on eBay because Logitech doesn't make this model any more. My current one has lasted ten years, but it never hurts to play it safe...
Because India has always produced high quality software. At least that's the perception. A quarter of the price and four times the quality is a pretty hard deal to pass up.
2-Some but if you read through the site above, you'll note that a lot, in unemployemnt are NOT "DeVry this" or "ITT" that.
Everyone is affected by this, MIT grads along with junior college dropouts. But when entry level jobs start at $60K, experienced workers are going to want a proportionately higher salary.
There is a cost to non-local development in the form of inefficient management, communication problems, training issues, and with overseas development, customer satisfaction as well. When the cost for a local worker is only 50% to 100% more than the remote worker, it can often be cost effective to stay local. But when the cost of local is 500% to 750% more, then it's much easier to justify going to for the cheap labor.
3-If free trade was about Level Playing Fields, then we would be insisting that India and other countries would raise their standards, instead of lowering ours.
This is always the argument that is raised. But we don't have any say over the internal policies of another nation. We only have control over our own. Why should we punish India for accepting our dollars, when at least some of the problem is our own damned fault?
A level playing field doesn't mean that everyone is equally handicapped. It means that the rules of the game are the same for all participants. The distinction is subtle, to be sure. But when we impose additional rules upon ourselves that we demand of no one else, then that is just handicapping ourselves.
When more than a half of my income goes towards taxes (income, sales, property, etc., both local and national), then something is seriously out of whack. Add to this the non-monetary cost of bureaucratic paperwork, and there's quite a bit of room to shrug off a few of those self-imposed handicaps.
To be absolutely crass and selfish about it, I would rather have a job and pay into my own retirement fund, then to be unemployed with social security. I can live with a few more potholes in the roads if it means I can be employed.
Speaking of the whole outsourcing phenomena in general, we in the US and Europe did it to ourselves.
1) The industry did it. We were lax in our quality. Shoddy software. Shoddy support. An industry with history's lowest customer satisfaction rating.
2) The workers did it. We demanded too high of wages. $100,000 is still considered an average wage for a techie. Yet we didn't have any professional degrees to back it up. Any DeVry or ITT dropout that read "Learn Java in 2 Hours" could get a job starting at $60,000".
3) The government did it. Wages are only half the cost of hiring an employee. Taxes, regulations, bureaucracy, etc., all increase the cost of an employee. While I'm not necessarily arguing for the complete removal of these economic hinderances, we should at least think about scaling them back somewhat. Free trade is about a level playing field, so why have we chosen to punt from the middle of a cratered minefield?
Bring back quality software, friendly support, realistic wages and an unencumbering economic policy, and you'll see these jobs come back.
[completely unrelated]: If you want some amusing truth, check out airamericaradio.com and the O'Franken factor.
Truth? From "I'm a Big Fat Liar" Franken? You've got to be kidding me! I'd be as surprised hearing truth coming from his lips as I would comedy. Of course, that's why he went into low-brow political commentating, he gets more laughs than he did when he was a comic.
GPL applies to an entire work, e.g. a GNOME or KDE program plus all the libraries it's linked against.
Incorrect. The GPL applies to the entire work, but ONLY the entire work. It does not apply to stuff that the licensor did not create. Specifically, a KDE program under the GPL does not virally infect the X11 libraries. They are SEPARATE works.
This is particularly true with the library uses a standardize API. For example, I can use any standard system call without my work being under the GPL, even though system calls are implemented in part by the GPL Linux kernel.
Gnome runs on Solaris. Solaris ships with a GPL-incompatible proprietary Openwindows X11 implementation. Yet Sun also ships with GPL applications (like Gnome) that link to it. No one's bitching about it.
Therefore, distributions have NO LEGAL RIGHT to distribute GPL-licensed programs linked against X libraries when the libraries are licensed under the new XFree86 license.
This is also wrong. See above. Consider that I can remove my XFree86 libraries from my system, replace them with any other set of X libaries, and my applications continue to work WITHOUT a recompile! I have actually done this on a Solaris box switching between X and Openwindows.
At compile time you're linking with a standard common API. It's only at runtime when you actually link with the libraries. And the GPL specifically and emphatically does not apply to use.
"Hey - at least I didn't have to fuck with a config file to get my wheel working in Windows"
Hey - at least I didn't have to fuck around with logging in as root and changing a bunch of file permissions to make this virus effective under Windows...
Slashdot Mirror
If he had stuck to the "big issues" like software patents, he wouldn't be on the lunatic fringe. He got there by ranting about arcane minutiae like which license to use for libraries, why that license is called "lesser" instead of "library", why a certain kernel must always be prefixed with "GNU", why you shouldn't use tcl/tk, why the wheel group is evil, why unified driver ABIs are wrong, etc.
On some of those minutiae, he is correct. But when he argues them just as forcefully as he argues his beliefs against software patents and for copyleft, he affirms his place among the lunatic fringe.
Sometimes Bob can be so stupid! Actually, that's not fair. He could be just an incredibly bright person trolling for idiot readers.
It's entirely possible that Microsoft will never die. So what? The problem that people have with Microsoft is not they exist, but they have an inordinately large market share (monopoly) on certain classes of software goods. If Microsoft were reduced to a tiny mom-and-pop providing tech support in Redmond, they would not have died, but neither would anyone care about them anymore. The goal isn't to "kill" Microsoft, but to fracture that huge block of marketshare into nice competitive chunks.
The reason government can't seem to do anything about Microsoft, is because it wasn't the government that gave them their monopoly. The marketplace handed out that monopoly, so it's up to the marketplace to take it back.
Some people will say that because Microsoft now has that monopoly, the marketplace cannot do anything about it, and the government must do something instead. But there's not much the government can do to stop people from choosing Windows or MSOffice. Sure, the feds could start throwing users in jail, but that's not going to go over well come next election.
The marketplace can, and will, remove the monopolist crown from Microsoft. But it won't do it today. Everybody is looking for a quick solution, but there is no quick solution, because the Microsoft monopoly wasn't created overnight. It took them ten years to get it.
Maybe it will be Linux that drives them from the thrown. Maybe it will be the Mac. Or maybe the desktop itself will go away leaving Bill Gates the king of nothing. But it won't happen today, or this month, or even this year. So stop crying about it.
However, you don't have to use Windows today. You don't have to use MSOffice this month. You don't have to buy any Microsoft product this year. You have a choice. You might not want to exercise that choice, but it is still yours to make. You can use Linux today if you don't demand a perfect Windows clone. You can use OSX today if you don't demand commodity hardware. You also have the choices of FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD if you want a Free Software OS, or Solaris if free-beer is good enough. You can replace IExplorer with Mozilla, Opera, or Konqueror. You can replace MSOffice with OpenOffice. I won't even bother listing the dozens of suitable replacements for Media Player.
Microsoft might never die, but why should you care?
How these people propose to fund the building of the roads that they will march on in protest is unclear, but it's an interesting case they put forward from a legal point of view.
1) The income tax is not the only tax. Not by a long shot. The US didn't have an income tax until 1916, IIRC, but there were roads before then. Several US states don't have income taxes, but they all seem to have their own state road systems.
2) The law trumps the law. The case these people put forward may be legally sound, the law still says you have to pay income taxes. In fact, anything the government says you have to you, you have to do.
*nor* the new owner can legally use the software without a "transfer of ownership"
The sales (or donation) receipt is all that you need. In fact, you don't even need that. If you disagree, please show me the law where it says otherwise.
The software manufacturers may bitch about it, but the last time I checked, they were NOT the law.
So all those titles on that wall of Windows applications will work on that old 75MHz Pentium running Win98? Wow!
Not to defend unsafe driving, but the reason that nearly everyone speeds is that many speed limits are set so such a low common denominator that you'd assume that brain-damaged chimpanzees were used as the baseline cases.
Except that we're talking San Fransisco here. This is the city where 99% of the drivers travel at 30MPH because the streets are packed, and 1% weave in and out of lanes at 60MPH because they don't care.
My grandma threw out all my father's Superman comics, going back to issue one, when enlisted in the marines in WWII. She figured he didn't need kiddy comic books anymore when he was off fighting in the pacific...
He used to tell me, "Son, if my Ma hadn't thrown out my Superone 1, I would be a rich man today. But since she did I can't afford a gardener, so GET OUT THERE AND MOW THE LAWN!"
And now the movie studio, director, and the quorint actor are going to be sued by Donald Trump for trademark infringement...
Just yesterday a coworker and myself were trying to figure out how many desktops Sun has had, or is proposing. I use the term "desktop" loosely.
g Glass
I came up with:
DPS
NeWS
OpenWindows
CDE
Gnome
JDS
Lookin
But since my friend was an ex-Sun employee who worked on NeWS, he came up with a few more that I never heard of.
Fonts used to be really hard to deal with, now you just plop new fonts in your home font directory, type 'fc-cache,' and everything works.
It's even easier than that. On my "horrible for newbies" FreeBSD system, all I need to do is let KDE install them for me, and I'm done!
I was going to reply with a thorough rebuttal of all of your points, including a detailed analysis of how many hundreds of gigabytes would be required to hold the statically linked versions of the packages I currently have installed (and how many days it would take to download them with a typical ADSL connection), but I decided better. I get the impression that you enjoy complaining, and any evidence that your complaints are groundless would only spoil the good mood you are in.
But asbestos suits are only harmful if you inhale them...
Sort of like my greenie friend who bitched at farmers and the lack of fuel emissions on their tractors, when he himself drove an "eco-friendly" Toyota that spewed blue smoke to commute fifty miles to work.
(but I'm sure his "caring" emotions more than compensated for his pollutomatic car)
Well if it weren't for the requirement "can take VB and convert", you would have a lot of options. VB needs to go away. People didn't use VB because of the language, they used it because you could write crappy throwaway programs and prototypes quickly. Using Python, Perl, Ruby, Delphi, Java and or even C++ underneath makes no difference, because 99% of the time the RAD developer isn't touching any code.
.NET. Without arguing one way or the other on the merits of .NET, one of the rationales for the decision was so that it would be easier to use Visual Basic. Huh?
Frankly, the whole "programming for non-programmers" approach needs to be seriously rethought. It's good that marketing types can quickly make a mockup of an app, but they should never be led to believe that they can do the work of developers. One quarter million dollar realtime embedded product I work on was spec'd by marketing to use
Why install Linux on a SPARC? Heck, why install Linux on a PCfor that matter? Maybe we should all just listen to our corporate masters at Microsoft, Sun and Apple and do what they tell us!
If you're writing network code, sniffers make invaluable debugging tools. You don't put sniffers in the software, because they are more valuable as stand alone tools, and problems usually arise out of the interaction of multiple applications. Should each of them have their own sniffer?
I'm not sure why they decided to drop the true third button from this model
Because some marketing puke at Logitech decided that no one used three buttons anyway, and so dropped it, but then introduced several new lines with five, six and seven buttons.
I hate scrollwheels, but I can understand why some people want them. "Click on the scrollbar? That's like so 90's!" But why can they make a mouse/trackball with a choice? Pop off the wheel and pop on a button!
Ditto. Except I have even an older model (three button, no scroll). In my opinion it's even more ergonomic because it has a flatter shape you can rest your hand on without the need to "grip" it. I bought three on eBay because Logitech doesn't make this model any more. My current one has lasted ten years, but it never hurts to play it safe...
1-And outsourcing will improve this how?
Because India has always produced high quality software. At least that's the perception. A quarter of the price and four times the quality is a pretty hard deal to pass up.
2-Some but if you read through the site above, you'll note that a lot, in unemployemnt are NOT "DeVry this" or "ITT" that.
Everyone is affected by this, MIT grads along with junior college dropouts. But when entry level jobs start at $60K, experienced workers are going to want a proportionately higher salary.
There is a cost to non-local development in the form of inefficient management, communication problems, training issues, and with overseas development, customer satisfaction as well. When the cost for a local worker is only 50% to 100% more than the remote worker, it can often be cost effective to stay local. But when the cost of local is 500% to 750% more, then it's much easier to justify going to for the cheap labor.
3-If free trade was about Level Playing Fields, then we would be insisting that India and other countries would raise their standards, instead of lowering ours.
This is always the argument that is raised. But we don't have any say over the internal policies of another nation. We only have control over our own. Why should we punish India for accepting our dollars, when at least some of the problem is our own damned fault?
A level playing field doesn't mean that everyone is equally handicapped. It means that the rules of the game are the same for all participants. The distinction is subtle, to be sure. But when we impose additional rules upon ourselves that we demand of no one else, then that is just handicapping ourselves.
When more than a half of my income goes towards taxes (income, sales, property, etc., both local and national), then something is seriously out of whack. Add to this the non-monetary cost of bureaucratic paperwork, and there's quite a bit of room to shrug off a few of those self-imposed handicaps.
To be absolutely crass and selfish about it, I would rather have a job and pay into my own retirement fund, then to be unemployed with social security. I can live with a few more potholes in the roads if it means I can be employed.
Speaking of the whole outsourcing phenomena in general, we in the US and Europe did it to ourselves.
1) The industry did it. We were lax in our quality. Shoddy software. Shoddy support. An industry with history's lowest customer satisfaction rating.
2) The workers did it. We demanded too high of wages. $100,000 is still considered an average wage for a techie. Yet we didn't have any professional degrees to back it up. Any DeVry or ITT dropout that read "Learn Java in 2 Hours" could get a job starting at $60,000".
3) The government did it. Wages are only half the cost of hiring an employee. Taxes, regulations, bureaucracy, etc., all increase the cost of an employee. While I'm not necessarily arguing for the complete removal of these economic hinderances, we should at least think about scaling them back somewhat. Free trade is about a level playing field, so why have we chosen to punt from the middle of a cratered minefield?
Bring back quality software, friendly support, realistic wages and an unencumbering economic policy, and you'll see these jobs come back.
Hmmm, you guys hiring in Hickory Flat? I'll have to learn the accent, but it sounds easier than learning Hindi.
[completely unrelated]: If you want some amusing truth, check out airamericaradio.com and the O'Franken factor.
Truth? From "I'm a Big Fat Liar" Franken? You've got to be kidding me! I'd be as surprised hearing truth coming from his lips as I would comedy. Of course, that's why he went into low-brow political commentating, he gets more laughs than he did when he was a comic.
GPL applies to an entire work, e.g. a GNOME or KDE program plus all the libraries it's linked against.
Incorrect. The GPL applies to the entire work, but ONLY the entire work. It does not apply to stuff that the licensor did not create. Specifically, a KDE program under the GPL does not virally infect the X11 libraries. They are SEPARATE works.
This is particularly true with the library uses a standardize API. For example, I can use any standard system call without my work being under the GPL, even though system calls are implemented in part by the GPL Linux kernel.
Gnome runs on Solaris. Solaris ships with a GPL-incompatible proprietary Openwindows X11 implementation. Yet Sun also ships with GPL applications (like Gnome) that link to it. No one's bitching about it.
Therefore, distributions have NO LEGAL RIGHT to distribute GPL-licensed programs linked against X libraries when the libraries are licensed under the new XFree86 license.
This is also wrong. See above. Consider that I can remove my XFree86 libraries from my system, replace them with any other set of X libaries, and my applications continue to work WITHOUT a recompile! I have actually done this on a Solaris box switching between X and Openwindows.
At compile time you're linking with a standard common API. It's only at runtime when you actually link with the libraries. And the GPL specifically and emphatically does not apply to use.
If it's such a concern for you, perhaps you could fix the code yourself? Sheesh, we're really getting nit picky here, aren't we?
"Hey - at least I didn't have to fuck with a config file to get my wheel working in Windows"
Hey - at least I didn't have to fuck around with logging in as root and changing a bunch of file permissions to make this virus effective under Windows...