I really like a lot of what Novell has done on the desktop, and some of the mono desktop apps are pretty terrific. But I sort of feel like I ought to be moving toward KDE now, and distancing myself from anything mono.
The question I have, though, is about the patents. Either MS has patents that can be used to attack linux or they're pulling another SCO on us.
So much of the argument against Novell hinges on the fact that they're enabling MS with this deal. As I understand the argument, it says that corporate customers will buy Novell, to be safe from potential lawsuits. If MS can pick off a critical mass of commercial users who are willing to pay, they can start to sue other people without damaging relationships with their large corporate customers. Even non-novell customers will have a way out -- they can buy Novell.
If MS has these patents, do we really believe that fear of alienating their customers is enough for them to refrain from suing people? Couldn't they sue IT companies -- linux companies, IBM, etc., without damaging their relationships with large corporate customers? And aren't those large customers so locked in that they really don't have anywhere to go if they're alienated, anyway?
To me, this really isn't about Novell. I don't pay them, and I don't code for any projects, so I understand that they don't really care about me. It would be irrational for them if they did. But this sort of burns the bridge to Novell and mono as far as I'm concerned. That's done.
But how big is this threat? Is this the beginning of legal threat spanning years and years. with fronts opening up in legislatures, in anti-trust enforcement agencies around the world, etc.?
Is this real, or is this a bunch of baseless stuff that's going to dog us for years?
If a free OS that's built from scratch by volunteers can't be allowed to exist in the current intellectual property law environment, what then? Does this mean we either have to give up and finally take on the intellectual property framework at some really fundamental level?
I don't know about PC World. I think if I ran Windows, it might be worthwhile, but I don't know.
I really like linux magazines, and I think they offer good counter examples to the print dynamic that a lot of people describe. Yes, it's true the web is free, and yes, it's updated all the time. But I find that print magazines tend to point out things to me I hadn't noticed before, and that they often have pretty good writeups.
It's not that you can't find information about some software project on the web -- it's that you might have heard of that project before, so you don't know to google it. The magazines do a good job of flagging interesting new stuff.
My main problem with these mags is that the ones from Europe are priced at insane levels here in the States. I was looking at one the other day on the newsstand, and I wanted it, but it was something like $15.99. It comes with a DVD, but what's that worth when you have broadband?
The problem isn't that the content isn't good, and the problem isn't that $16 is a huge amount of money in the scheme of things. The problem is that you sort of feel taken advantage of at that price. No one wants to feel like a chump, but at $16, that's where you end up.
But a linux journal subscription, which is something like $25 for a year, is a great deal.
I'm not saying that this should be censored. It shouldn't.
But this feels like trolling -- deliberately saying or doing something controversial, to draw attention. And trolling is lame.
If they choose to open this door -- to associate an electronic device that has nothing to do with race with all of this ugly history, just to be titilating -- then they deserve whatever they get.
What possible difference could it make to me whether godaddy parks domains with IIS or apache? If godaddy's choice moves the stats in a significant way, then the stats aren't meaningful.
I've been waiting for something like this -- something that gets ordinary people to spy on one another. I know people will say this is the border, and the people crossing aren't "us".
But I don't buy the distinction between "us" and the people crossing, and I don't believe this will stop at the border. Pretty soon we'll have the public looking for traffic violations, doing screen caps and scribbling down license numbers, infrared cams in parks looking for kids having fun at night, etc.
We can put cams outside of bars, and let people look for people coming out, staggering a bit, and getting into their cars. You don't support drunk driving do you? And it's all on a public street.
If we all spy on each other, we can live in a crime free paradise! Look how well that whole stasi thing worked out.
No one agrees with me on this, but I think that you have to know a computer language to understand computers. It can even be something like LOGO, for kids. I'm not suggesting that someone has to know a set of GUI widgets for a modern desktop or anything.
If you know a language, you know what an algorithm is, even if you don't know the word. And if you know what an algorithm is, you pretty much know what a computer is.
I'm a giant fan of that MIT vision -- LOGO for kids, extensible and scriptable apps for adults, cheap laptops for people in parts of the world where money is scarce, open information on the web, etc.
I don't have kids, though, and I've never convinced anyone that their kids would be better of learning LOGO than powerpoint. Everyone says the same thing -- you don't have to be an engineer to drive a car.
I was lucky -- I got to learn about computers with a KIM-1 single board machine, and timesharing on a PDP-10, reading books about games written by hippies. If I wanted to play a game, I'd usually have to port it from one dialect of BASIC to another. It wasn't really hard, and it's not really fair to call them ports. But you had to understand the code at least a little bit.
I think it would be a lot harder to learn from iTunes.
The bit about the new version of office doing little more than maintain the company's dominance in office software sort of sums it up for me. What's it supposed to do? Entertain pundits?
Suppsoedly, we in the linux community talk about how we like continuous upgrades. Nat Friedman of Novell said that in an interview. You don't come out with something revolutionary -- you just improve it continuously. We bash MS for not doing that.
But here's this guy saying that the new release of windows isn't going to be new enough, not enough of a dramatic break with the past. It will probably run programs reliably, but it's not *exciting* or *entertaining*.
It's probably going to plug a lot of the security holes they have now. Fewer people will run as Administrator. ActiveX won't be so dangerous. And that's really all that they have to do.
I don't need Dell to support linux in the traditional sense. And I don't even need them to sell me a PC that doesn't have windows.
All I want from Dell is a commmittment to ship hardware for which open source drivers are available -- for them to say, for example, we need open source audio drivers or we won't ue your soundcard/integrated chipset, or your graphics chipset, or whatever. If Dell leaned on vendors, they'd give open source developers the info they need to support their products.
The not having to pay for windows thing is tricky, and I know it bugs a lot of people. I understand why. But for me the bottom line is that I just want stuff to work, and a Dell with a windows license is still a good machine at a good price, even if you don't use the license.
It would be cool if Dell could make sure that dual boot people could reinstall windows in a differently sized partition, though -- if they could make sure that you get the installation CDs or whatever else you need to do that. I haven't really been following things, but I hear that some people get machines with ghost backups of windows instead of a real install CD. That sort of thing is a problem from a practical point of view for a linux guy who wants the ability to dual boot.
A lot of people talk about how google brings net services in, and that eventually that will do a lot more good than staying away would. That's not a dumb argument, or one that can be dismissed out of hand.
But I think that when people from outside of the country take a stand, and tell the truth about what's right and what's not, it makes a difference. There are people in China who are fighting, and when companies or foreign governments stand by what's right, those people know that they're not alone, and that they're not crazy, and what they're fighting for is real.
I take some comfort when the UN critizes US behavior in Guantanamo for that reason. I know the UN isn't going to be able to bring about a change in policy, but it's nice to know there's a world beyond talk radio and cable news coverage.
In google's defense, it is a lot of money. And I guess if they can believe their giant jetliner is good for the world, because they can fly people other rich people to africa to see what poverty is really like, then they can believe that what they're doing in china is good for the world too. I guess when you're that successful, everything you do is good for the world.
I've seen live windows CDs, and I always have the feeling that I should be able to use those to clean off the really nasty stuff. I'm a linux guy, and only deal with this when I'm trying to help someone else out, so I just don't have the windows guruhood to deal with the problem.
I know it's pretty straightforward to boot with a live CD and run something like ad-aware or spybot from it, but then you're scanning the registry that came off of the livecd, and not the infected one. I think there are tricks to do this, but I've never hunkered down and learned them.
Reinstalling really sucks. It takes a long time, and with product keys, and online activation, and machines that don't ship with CDs any more, it's getting dicier all the time. It works, but it's a very blunt tool solution, and it's a big waste of time.
I really hope that vista cuts down on these problems -- I expect that it will, as I don't think people will be running as administrator any more. But I just don't have the time to wipe off someone else's machine every time it gets sick.
I don't know if this point has been made before, but I think that the closed platforms on which games run will make it almost impossible for them to have any kind of long term cultural impact. It really depends if they'll be available and playable 20, or 50, or a hundred years from now.
I know that things like MAME are keeping the old games alive, but is it really going to be possible to emulate a 360? That's a pretty complicated machine, and DRM is built into the very fabric of it.
In many ways, we're in sort of an odd place culturally now. The way things are produced and distributed is fairly different than its been in the past. We have a strong focus on what's new and hot and current to a very unusual degree. People are actually manufacturing demand for various cultural products. Right now they're doing that in a big way for the King Kong remake, for example.
I was an English major, and one of the things you notice if you're an English major is that there are big trunks of tradition running through the cannon. Guys like Homer and Chaucer and Shakespeare, works like the King James Bible, etc.
English literature is based on a cultural commons, and there are tons of references and evokations that carry a lot of meaning. I don't know if that would have been able to come together if big multinational corporations had built lots of toll booths around those stories.
The question that everyone focuses on is whether or not games, as a medium, are really capable of carrying nuanced meaning, or recreating complicated types of human experience. And honestly, I don't know if they're really capable of carrying the same kind of meaning that you get from Proust. But at the same time, I don't know that a novel is capable of carrying the same sort of visceral experiences that you can create in games.
But there's another question that isn't raised, and that I think is really significant. Can a medium that doesn't really have a cultural commons create a tradtion that can propel it forward into some sort of artistic greatness?
Corporations have run movies for a long time, and people have made a lot of really amazing films. But I would argue that tv has functioned as a kind of cultural commons, and that the medium itself is fairly robust in the face of technical change. I mean, it's pretty easy to watch a movie that was made in the 30's today. You can watch old lumiere brothers movies if you want to.
Games are more rigidly controlled by corporations, they seem likely to be the medium that's going to be most entertwined with DRM, and they're extremely dependent on specific platforms. All of those things are going to make a cultural commons for gaming a much more difficult thing to produce.
I think that it's too hard to install a lot of software under linux. apt is great under Debian or Ubuntu if your package is in the repository, but for things that aren't in the repository, installation is pretty hard.
In OS X, you can download a.dmg file, which is automatically mounted, and then you can just drag an icon into your Applications folder. That's really cool. Most OS X users don't even know that the app icon that they're dragging is actually a directory.
For me, some of the really cool gnome and/or mono apps (like beagle) are great examples of what's simultaneously right and wrong. The apps themselves are pretty great, but they're incredibly difficult to install on many systems.
Let the doctors work this out
on
Film to X-rays?
·
· Score: 1
Doctors know how to get ahold of images, how to move them around, etc.
Let the 2nd opinion doctor tell him what to do. It won't involve using a lamp and scanning it, either. It might involve picking up a copy at the hopsital where the images were created. Or it might involve the other doctor just pulling up the image on that hospital's web site.
Again, there are systems and protocols that exist to give people who ought to have access to images access to them. Just don't get in the way, or make problems for the people who are going to do this.
We have two data points. First, the writing seems to be slanted in favor of Apple (I don't know if that's true, but I'l concede it here). Second, the big tech writers are using Apples (again, I'll take his word on that).
Dvorak says that there must be a causal relationship between those two factors -- because the tech writers use Apples, they tend to root for Apple.
It's more reasonable to assume that both of those data points correlate because they were both caused by the same thing -- namely, that people who know what they're doing and have options would rather run Macs. Maybe the tech writers see everything, and choose to run Macs because they like them better. And maybe what they write reflects that.
I have a couple of USB2 enclosures, and they tend to fail under linux. They work ok under windows on the same hardware, but if I do a lot of writing under linux, they stop working.
I've talked to other people who have the same problem.
Is this a hardware problem? Is it a matter of errors accumulating, and linux giving up, while windows keeps on plugging?
Right now, I'm using my PC via an ancient (233Mhz) laptop, via ssh and vnc. I get to use a very light laptop that I bought 3 years ago for $200, and I get the power of my PC's desktop. This laptop is too slow to run a decent desktop convincingly on its own.
My desktop system is more of a blob of data that I latch on to with different terminals over the network. Sometimes I use the PC itself, sometimes I use this laptop, sometimes I use a computer at my parents' house. I've visted people and used a live CD.
It doesn't really matter how big my PC is, if I run it this way. In fact, the smaller the better.
It would be cool to carry an object that had everything in it (like a phone) instead of connecting to my desktop over the network. I think that would be an improvement.
Instead of saying Columba sucks because it's written in java, maybe we should reconsider the old conventional wisdom about java gui programs.
Azureus really is fairly slick.
On top of that, the idea of flaming guys for writing good software and giving it away is sort of hard to understand.
No one seems to be talking about how this sort of thing chips away at lock in. It's not a death blow to lock in, but it does take a little chink out of it, and over time, those chinks add up.
I always buy my computer equpipment based on flyovers. Whoever does the best job of buzzing the other guy gets my business.
This the way that I figure it. Everyone knows that kids are good at computers. And everyone knows that geeks lack social skills. Heck, I'm a geek and I lack them.
So it follows that a company that comes off like a bunch of adolescent jerks would have really good stuff.
All sarcasm aside, I haven't had a sun server in a long time, but my old sparc 5 boxes were really great. Extremely solid and reliable. Their new stuff probably is pretty good.
But all this ad campaign does is make me hope that the free java stack comes sooner rather than later. If it's open, no one can break it, and these guys aren't inspiring confidence.
Finally, whenever I see something like this, I always think of Thomas Frank's book "The Conquest of Cool." It's about how corporations use counter culture and rebellion to sell themselves, and the cultural significance of their eagerness to do so. It's a good read.
Maybe if sun had a really kick ass spokesrebel -- like scammer and z-dog. Or maybe if the ads were 10% more proactive. That would be awesomely outrageous.
I mean, the guys running sun are just like me -- they're getting bitchslapped by the man, and so am I. Only they have their own jets.
MySQL AB has given lots of people very useful software for free, for a long time.
Now we're supposed to hate them because of this deal?
My relationship with them has been one in which they give me free database software, don't restrict how I use it, and I give them nothing.
Even people who don't use MySQL themselves benefit from all of the dynamic web sites -- the WordPress blogs, the sites with threaded discussion boards, etc. Or from their ISPs being about to use MySQL for the backend of all sorts of critical services -- mail forwarding tables, etc.
It's like none of that matters without absolute orthodoxy on the part of MySQL AB. None of the good stuff matters, if they do one thing we don't like.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a T21. $208. :)
I use FreeNX to pull up my home desktop, and it works beautifully.
My gut reaction to this deal is very negative.
I really like a lot of what Novell has done on the desktop, and some of the mono desktop apps are pretty terrific. But I sort of feel like I ought to be moving toward KDE now, and distancing myself from anything mono.
The question I have, though, is about the patents. Either MS has patents that can be used to attack linux or they're pulling another SCO on us.
So much of the argument against Novell hinges on the fact that they're enabling MS with this deal. As I understand the argument, it says that corporate customers will buy Novell, to be safe from potential lawsuits. If MS can pick off a critical mass of commercial users who are willing to pay, they can start to sue other people without damaging relationships with their large corporate customers. Even non-novell customers will have a way out -- they can buy Novell.
If MS has these patents, do we really believe that fear of alienating their customers is enough for them to refrain from suing people? Couldn't they sue IT companies -- linux companies, IBM, etc., without damaging their relationships with large corporate customers? And aren't those large customers so locked in that they really don't have anywhere to go if they're alienated, anyway?
To me, this really isn't about Novell. I don't pay them, and I don't code for any projects, so I understand that they don't really care about me. It would be irrational for them if they did. But this sort of burns the bridge to Novell and mono as far as I'm concerned. That's done.
But how big is this threat? Is this the beginning of legal threat spanning years and years. with fronts opening up in legislatures, in anti-trust enforcement agencies around the world, etc.?
Is this real, or is this a bunch of baseless stuff that's going to dog us for years?
If a free OS that's built from scratch by volunteers can't be allowed to exist in the current intellectual property law environment, what then? Does this mean we either have to give up and finally take on the intellectual property framework at some really fundamental level?
I don't know about PC World. I think if I ran Windows, it might be worthwhile, but I don't know.
I really like linux magazines, and I think they offer good counter examples to the print dynamic that a lot of people describe. Yes, it's true the web is free, and yes, it's updated all the time. But I find that print magazines tend to point out things to me I hadn't noticed before, and that they often have pretty good writeups.
It's not that you can't find information about some software project on the web -- it's that you might have heard of that project before, so you don't know to google it. The magazines do a good job of flagging interesting new stuff.
My main problem with these mags is that the ones from Europe are priced at insane levels here in the States. I was looking at one the other day on the newsstand, and I wanted it, but it was something like $15.99. It comes with a DVD, but what's that worth when you have broadband?
The problem isn't that the content isn't good, and the problem isn't that $16 is a huge amount of money in the scheme of things. The problem is that you sort of feel taken advantage of at that price. No one wants to feel like a chump, but at $16, that's where you end up.
But a linux journal subscription, which is something like $25 for a year, is a great deal.
I'm not saying that this should be censored. It shouldn't.
But this feels like trolling -- deliberately saying or doing something controversial, to draw attention. And trolling is lame.
If they choose to open this door -- to associate an electronic device that has nothing to do with race with all of this ugly history, just to be titilating -- then they deserve whatever they get.
These numbers are meaningless.
What possible difference could it make to me whether godaddy parks domains with IIS or apache? If godaddy's choice moves the stats in a significant way, then the stats aren't meaningful.
I've been waiting for something like this -- something that gets ordinary people to spy on one another. I know people will say this is the border, and the people crossing aren't "us".
But I don't buy the distinction between "us" and the people crossing, and I don't believe this will stop at the border. Pretty soon we'll have the public looking for traffic violations, doing screen caps and scribbling down license numbers, infrared cams in parks looking for kids having fun at night, etc.
We can put cams outside of bars, and let people look for people coming out, staggering a bit, and getting into their cars. You don't support drunk driving do you? And it's all on a public street.
If we all spy on each other, we can live in a crime free paradise! Look how well that whole stasi thing worked out.
No one agrees with me on this, but I think that you have to know a computer language to understand computers. It can even be something like LOGO, for kids. I'm not suggesting that someone has to know a set of GUI widgets for a modern desktop or anything.
If you know a language, you know what an algorithm is, even if you don't know the word. And if you know what an algorithm is, you pretty much know what a computer is.
I'm a giant fan of that MIT vision -- LOGO for kids, extensible and scriptable apps for adults, cheap laptops for people in parts of the world where money is scarce, open information on the web, etc.
I don't have kids, though, and I've never convinced anyone that their kids would be better of learning LOGO than powerpoint. Everyone says the same thing -- you don't have to be an engineer to drive a car.
I was lucky -- I got to learn about computers with a KIM-1 single board machine, and timesharing on a PDP-10, reading books about games written by hippies. If I wanted to play a game, I'd usually have to port it from one dialect of BASIC to another. It wasn't really hard, and it's not really fair to call them ports. But you had to understand the code at least a little bit.
I think it would be a lot harder to learn from iTunes.
I'd like to see a PDP-11.
The bit about the new version of office doing little more than maintain the company's dominance in office software sort of sums it up for me. What's it supposed to do? Entertain pundits?
Suppsoedly, we in the linux community talk about how we like continuous upgrades. Nat Friedman of Novell said that in an interview. You don't come out with something revolutionary -- you just improve it continuously. We bash MS for not doing that.
But here's this guy saying that the new release of windows isn't going to be new enough, not enough of a dramatic break with the past. It will probably run programs reliably, but it's not *exciting* or *entertaining*.
It's probably going to plug a lot of the security holes they have now. Fewer people will run as Administrator. ActiveX won't be so dangerous. And that's really all that they have to do.
I don't need Dell to support linux in the traditional sense. And I don't even need them to sell me a PC that doesn't have windows.
All I want from Dell is a commmittment to ship hardware for which open source drivers are available -- for them to say, for example, we need open source audio drivers or we won't ue your soundcard/integrated chipset, or your graphics chipset, or whatever. If Dell leaned on vendors, they'd give open source developers the info they need to support their products.
The not having to pay for windows thing is tricky, and I know it bugs a lot of people. I understand why. But for me the bottom line is that I just want stuff to work, and a Dell with a windows license is still a good machine at a good price, even if you don't use the license.
It would be cool if Dell could make sure that dual boot people could reinstall windows in a differently sized partition, though -- if they could make sure that you get the installation CDs or whatever else you need to do that. I haven't really been following things, but I hear that some people get machines with ghost backups of windows instead of a real install CD. That sort of thing is a problem from a practical point of view for a linux guy who wants the ability to dual boot.
A lot of people talk about how google brings net services in, and that eventually that will do a lot more good than staying away would. That's not a dumb argument, or one that can be dismissed out of hand.
But I think that when people from outside of the country take a stand, and tell the truth about what's right and what's not, it makes a difference. There are people in China who are fighting, and when companies or foreign governments stand by what's right, those people know that they're not alone, and that they're not crazy, and what they're fighting for is real.
I take some comfort when the UN critizes US behavior in Guantanamo for that reason. I know the UN isn't going to be able to bring about a change in policy, but it's nice to know there's a world beyond talk radio and cable news coverage.
In google's defense, it is a lot of money. And I guess if they can believe their giant jetliner is good for the world, because they can fly people other rich people to africa to see what poverty is really like, then they can believe that what they're doing in china is good for the world too. I guess when you're that successful, everything you do is good for the world.
I've seen live windows CDs, and I always have the feeling that I should be able to use those to clean off the really nasty stuff. I'm a linux guy, and only deal with this when I'm trying to help someone else out, so I just don't have the windows guruhood to deal with the problem.
I know it's pretty straightforward to boot with a live CD and run something like ad-aware or spybot from it, but then you're scanning the registry that came off of the livecd, and not the infected one. I think there are tricks to do this, but I've never hunkered down and learned them.
Reinstalling really sucks. It takes a long time, and with product keys, and online activation, and machines that don't ship with CDs any more, it's getting dicier all the time. It works, but it's a very blunt tool solution, and it's a big waste of time.
I really hope that vista cuts down on these problems -- I expect that it will, as I don't think people will be running as administrator any more. But I just don't have the time to wipe off someone else's machine every time it gets sick.
I don't know if this point has been made before, but I think that the closed platforms on which games run will make it almost impossible for them to have any kind of long term cultural impact. It really depends if they'll be available and playable 20, or 50, or a hundred years from now.
I know that things like MAME are keeping the old games alive, but is it really going to be possible to emulate a 360? That's a pretty complicated machine, and DRM is built into the very fabric of it.
In many ways, we're in sort of an odd place culturally now. The way things are produced and distributed is fairly different than its been in the past. We have a strong focus on what's new and hot and current to a very unusual degree. People are actually manufacturing demand for various cultural products. Right now they're doing that in a big way for the King Kong remake, for example.
I was an English major, and one of the things you notice if you're an English major is that there are big trunks of tradition running through the cannon. Guys like Homer and Chaucer and Shakespeare, works like the King James Bible, etc.
English literature is based on a cultural commons, and there are tons of references and evokations that carry a lot of meaning. I don't know if that would have been able to come together if big multinational corporations had built lots of toll booths around those stories.
The question that everyone focuses on is whether or not games, as a medium, are really capable of carrying nuanced meaning, or recreating complicated types of human experience. And honestly, I don't know if they're really capable of carrying the same kind of meaning that you get from Proust. But at the same time, I don't know that a novel is capable of carrying the same sort of visceral experiences that you can create in games.
But there's another question that isn't raised, and that I think is really significant. Can a medium that doesn't really have a cultural commons create a tradtion that can propel it forward into some sort of artistic greatness?
Corporations have run movies for a long time, and people have made a lot of really amazing films. But I would argue that tv has functioned as a kind of cultural commons, and that the medium itself is fairly robust in the face of technical change. I mean, it's pretty easy to watch a movie that was made in the 30's today. You can watch old lumiere brothers movies if you want to.
Games are more rigidly controlled by corporations, they seem likely to be the medium that's going to be most entertwined with DRM, and they're extremely dependent on specific platforms. All of those things are going to make a cultural commons for gaming a much more difficult thing to produce.
You might want to take a look at klik:
http://klik.atekon.de/
Get another cable modem, and just keep them completely separate.
If you're willing to spend $500, you can fund that set up for almost a year.
I think that it's too hard to install a lot of software under linux. apt is great under Debian or Ubuntu if your package is in the repository, but for things that aren't in the repository, installation is pretty hard.
.dmg file, which is automatically mounted, and then you can just drag an icon into your Applications folder. That's really cool. Most OS X users don't even know that the app icon that they're dragging is actually a directory.
In OS X, you can download a
For me, some of the really cool gnome and/or mono apps (like beagle) are great examples of what's simultaneously right and wrong. The apps themselves are pretty great, but they're incredibly difficult to install on many systems.
Doctors know how to get ahold of images, how to move them around, etc.
Let the 2nd opinion doctor tell him what to do. It won't involve using a lamp and scanning it, either. It might involve picking up a copy at the hopsital where the images were created. Or it might involve the other doctor just pulling up the image on that hospital's web site.
Again, there are systems and protocols that exist to give people who ought to have access to images access to them. Just don't get in the way, or make problems for the people who are going to do this.
We have two data points. First, the writing seems to be slanted in favor of Apple (I don't know if that's true, but I'l concede it here). Second, the big tech writers are using Apples (again, I'll take his word on that).
Dvorak says that there must be a causal relationship between those two factors -- because the tech writers use Apples, they tend to root for Apple.
It's more reasonable to assume that both of those data points correlate because they were both caused by the same thing -- namely, that people who know what they're doing and have options would rather run Macs. Maybe the tech writers see everything, and choose to run Macs because they like them better. And maybe what they write reflects that.
Thanks for posting...
Could you give me a pointer to how you get your firewire drive to work? My enclosure handles both, but neither works well with stock configurations.
I have a couple of USB2 enclosures, and they tend to fail under linux. They work ok under windows on the same hardware, but if I do a lot of writing under linux, they stop working.
I've talked to other people who have the same problem.
Is this a hardware problem? Is it a matter of errors accumulating, and linux giving up, while windows keeps on plugging?
Right now, I'm using my PC via an ancient (233Mhz) laptop, via ssh and vnc. I get to use a very light laptop that I bought 3 years ago for $200, and I get the power of my PC's desktop. This laptop is too slow to run a decent desktop convincingly on its own.
My desktop system is more of a blob of data that I latch on to with different terminals over the network. Sometimes I use the PC itself, sometimes I use this laptop, sometimes I use a computer at my parents' house. I've visted people and used a live CD.
It doesn't really matter how big my PC is, if I run it this way. In fact, the smaller the better.
It would be cool to carry an object that had everything in it (like a phone) instead of connecting to my desktop over the network. I think that would be an improvement.
That's pretty much my reaction.
Instead of saying Columba sucks because it's written in java, maybe we should reconsider the old conventional wisdom about java gui programs.
Azureus really is fairly slick.
On top of that, the idea of flaming guys for writing good software and giving it away is sort of hard to understand.
No one seems to be talking about how this sort of thing chips away at lock in. It's not a death blow to lock in, but it does take a little chink out of it, and over time, those chinks add up.
I hope they don't keep the planes and fire the R&D people. But that's sort of what I expect they'll do.
I always buy my computer equpipment based on flyovers. Whoever does the best job of buzzing the other guy gets my business.
This the way that I figure it. Everyone knows that kids are good at computers. And everyone knows that geeks lack social skills. Heck, I'm a geek and I lack them.
So it follows that a company that comes off like a bunch of adolescent jerks would have really good stuff.
All sarcasm aside, I haven't had a sun server in a long time, but my old sparc 5 boxes were really great. Extremely solid and reliable. Their new stuff probably is pretty good.
But all this ad campaign does is make me hope that the free java stack comes sooner rather than later. If it's open, no one can break it, and these guys aren't inspiring confidence.
Finally, whenever I see something like this, I always think of Thomas Frank's book "The Conquest of Cool." It's about how corporations use counter culture and rebellion to sell themselves, and the cultural significance of their eagerness to do so. It's a good read.
Maybe if sun had a really kick ass spokesrebel -- like scammer and z-dog. Or maybe if the ads were 10% more proactive. That would be awesomely outrageous.
I mean, the guys running sun are just like me -- they're getting bitchslapped by the man, and so am I. Only they have their own jets.
MySQL AB has given lots of people very useful software for free, for a long time.
Now we're supposed to hate them because of this deal?
My relationship with them has been one in which they give me free database software, don't restrict how I use it, and I give them nothing.
Even people who don't use MySQL themselves benefit from all of the dynamic web sites -- the WordPress blogs, the sites with threaded discussion boards, etc. Or from their ISPs being about to use MySQL for the backend of all sorts of critical services -- mail forwarding tables, etc.
It's like none of that matters without absolute orthodoxy on the part of MySQL AB. None of the good stuff matters, if they do one thing we don't like.