it is simple really. when an unsanctioned copy is made the copy becomes an outcast child and traditionally the parents and the rest of the community do not acknowledge your existence so if you are ever in a danger they can witness they will not help you. MS should not have to support unauthorized use of its software.
that said, if the pirates can find a way to get access to those patches and even install them, that is fair game as well. if the outcast manages to find a way to survive on their own, then they are achieving the ultimate goal, that of preservation/survival. a world view shared by the parents and the rest of the community. they shun the outcast but not kill them. they leave it up to nature to decide the outcasts fate.
obviously MS is not at all like the above imagery. MS would never consider it fair game that you have and use an unauthorized copy of windows xp. but still the outcast must fend for themselves.
this is one point of view. another is where every copy of windows XP is supported by patches. simply because an unauthorized copy of windows xp can exist on a network connected to authorized copies of windows xp. now if only the authorized copies recieved patches that would leave the unauthorized copies vulnerable effectively making the whole network icnreasingly susceptible to exploitation by worms and viruses. supporting every copy by giving authorized copies several dedicated sources to download from, and the unauthorized get a lousy.torrent . this way MS gains more control over the image of its product. less negative press can occur because of exploitation simply by supporting unauthorized copies.
how is it possible for a manufacturer to make a product and sell it when it is such a fundamental problem? what kind of quality standards are these manufacturers catering to? is it cheaper to produce and sell buggy hardware than it is to develop quality hardware and produce and sell it?
i remember using redhat 6 on my old presario laptop. i remember having issues with the suondcard. in fact i had a similar issue. the sound would work for a few seconds then stop. it was always like this with each session. i read up on my cards drivers in the linux kernel docs and found that there are some special settings that needed to be set. i configured my card, reloaded the kernel module and lo and behold i never had a problem since. when i tried the same card in freebsd i have the same trouble. not that the drivers didnt work, but that i had some extra settings to tweak because my card supported those extra features. one included how the card handled buffered streams. this card was an ESS 1688. tricky card if you ask me.
today i have a new system. nforce2 based. the only thing i have idea whether it works is the nvidia MCP eth card. and i think that might be due to lack of drivers which nvidia doesnt want to give out or something like that. everything else works. OUT OF THE BOX. to make matters even more interesting most of my media works in windows xp and linux (slackware 9.1.0) i cant find a media type that doesnt have support in linux. my only problem is.doc i want to be able to work with anything MS can output, but right now its still a little tricky. all that said, the only reason i keep windows is simply for games and homework. i dont trust it for anything else. i have lost to much data to windows crashing in the past that i periodically move my homework and save game files onto my linux parition just incase. so far i have lost whole albums i ripped to my computer in wma format during software upgrades. windows xp is a pain in my ass.
so if you ever read this langa, you are simply wrong. look deeper into your setup. most of the answers are right there. can you at least point out WHY your soundcard doesnt work in linux? you opint out a software problem, you ever thought of a user config problem? plus you seem to have forgotten that most manufactures develop FOR WIDNOWS! their drivers are designed to work best with windows. they send their drivers to be bundled in with windows to give the appearance that peripherals work out of the box. truth of the matter, i have some hardware here that windows can not support natively. hardware that would not work correctly without the manufactures drivers. and depending on how well the manufacture makes their drivers i usually have to keep updating my drivers with each new release to benefit from the improvements. i dont quite see that as much of an alternative lifestyle. ill tell you this though, once i got my soundcard workin on my laptop, i never had an issue with it. that's why i like linux. its reliable when configured properly.
mind you if your opinion is that this is the achilles heel because it requires users to configure their own systems even after an install, remember that windows gets all that work done for them in great part by the manufactures developping drivers that WILL WORK with windows. you dont see that many manufactures making drivers for any distro or any version of the linux kernel. windows has years of support in this form. linux does not. and in the time linux has come i think it is infinetly more usable than DOS ever was. anyways.
you ever wondered by certain things are easier in windows? maybe that is because so many hardware manufacturers develop for windows and nothing else. try getting said printer working in BeOS which is even easier to use that windows/macos/linux. if the drivers do not exist, hardware will not work as well.
so i would say a unified driver interface would be something that OSes need to have so that compiling the drivers for a particular OS is as simple as compiling the driver from within said OS and distributing the binaries. less work for OS developers all they have to do is buy into the unified driver interface and voila.
with that taken care off, all that remains is the unified toolkit interface. you write one application and you can deploy it in any OS environment. sounds a bit like java. but even C could have fit the bill. remember back when C was supposed to be the unifying language of unix. nowadays porting a program written in C though it can be done one often encounters a few snags.
X works. it just needs drivers that are on the same quality level as their counterparts in windows. X has features in it that windows XP only now incorporated. think: remote desktop. X has this remoteness builtin its an old feature in X. Y doesnt necessarily solve any of those issues. but hey, i hope Y does well.
i would say that what the unixes of the world need is a clean driver interface, something on par with what netbsd has. this will once and for all take care of the driver issue.
for packages we need a standard filesystem layout that all the main distros support and follow. then it doesnt matter whether you use rpm, deb, or tarballs. whats important is that each of those package management schemes keep a human-readable (probably in xml) database that keeps track of where each file in each package was installed. this way it matters less what package manager you use, since there is a standard methodology for handling packages. package managers can still be unique as they generally incorporate a distribution model (debs especially) but the put the really important files in the same place respecting the filesystem layout standard. this takes care of your installation/uninstallation issue.
as for toolkit. developers need a unified toolkit that will allow them to either target a particular toolkit such as qt/kde or gtk/gnome or cocoa, or.net. this way you can write their application add whatever semantics each OS requires, and then compile for many targets. its not the best solution, but they need to start doing this while they are in the development phase.
DirectX/PS2/Cube they are all platforms that games. a toolkit is necessary that emulates each one of those so that game developers can simply recompile for their target OS and have the game ready for OSes such as linux.
but all this is really just fluff. linux has already achieved. as an OS it is excellent for servers and desktops. its ability to support hardware has always been there. it just sucks when you spend most of your time reverse engineering hardware you own so it can run with the OS of your choice. so the OS is already ready and now going places. it is the other projects you are talking about when you say Linux can catch up with Windows. desktop environment projects. application projects. lets remember the context. windows is a corporation where they pay their programmers to make these software apps. that's ALL they do. open source developers often work on these projects in their spare time and have day jobs. a few lucky ones get paid for the work they do. if everyone got paid what they deserved for the work they did then this would be an ideal world wouldnt it? but that is not the initial reason these developers are working on these projects, they are doing this because they are passionate about it (at least i think so). part of the development process is users submitting bug reports and and code that helps their own efforts. granted not everyone can program (i cant), but still, being a
Re:Never mind spatial, how awful would THIS be?
on
GNOME 2.6 Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
hehehe, i have not be known to be able to translate some of my ideas into their correct forms in english or to even think through some of the implications of the thoughts i have.
at the time though, i imagined a system that presented the most intuitive interface for the task i wished to accomplish. take for example a black box computer. you tell it what to do, point it to the resources you specifically want it to use, and let it do the rest. but then again, i am probably thinking of something that is pretty much AI.
sorry i hurt your head;)
i like this idea. maybe words can have their own default config files as well. so searching for a particular thing for example "pictures of horses" can be properly parsed into only returning instances of pictures of horses. or something like "pictures of horses but not brown ones".
there is nothing wrong with using different metaphors for different tasks. if the computer detects less than a certain number of files, the user can be presented, by default, with a spatial interface.
more files and we have the extended navigational interface. with remote filesystems the user can be presented with a simpler navigational interface with special buttons that relate to the type of network environment the filesystem exists in.
the computer can do all that, and the user can benefit.
give an iPod wireless capabilities so that it would 1) distribute files to other iPods "sans fils" 2) synchronize with other iPods so they all play the same song at the same time and depending on who in that particular configuration is designated as DJ etc etc the other iPods follow suit. im sure someone else has thought about this.
it would make sense then for universities to act as local wholesalers. the uni gets a copy of the latest beta or linux iso and stores them on a dedicated server. the students then do not have to worry about taking up the bandwidth of the uni connection to the net. in the future, students could pay the uni possibly a flat rate or something like that to access the dedicated server and download whatever commercial software is hosted on the server. i think its a good idea to do it this way, but this is only one of hte many ways to use bittorrent as a distribution method.
maybe you fail to remember how much history windows has with those things. linux was never a gaming platform, neither was it (historically) lauded for tis office suite. linux has had to do some serious catching up. even macosx makes use of MSoffice because at the very least this is what most people know.
as for games, it is a matter of (historical) demand. a company is less inclined to create games or software for linux, when they have to invest enough time and money developping on tried-and-true platforms. why develop for linux when the return on invest is going to be minial.
the other thing is perception. linux is NOT perceived as a desktop operating system. when you talk about linux, many will think first of it as a server. and more often than not this is what linux is used as. some kind of advertising and marketing needs to be done to create the percpetion that linux is a desktop OS that millions of people use in their daily lives and that those people would be willing to pay for games if they were developped for linux.
as for hardware support...that's up to the hardware companies to release drivers for linux. personally i dont think it would be to expensive for them to do this, but then again why should they when their return on investment comes from people using Windows.
the important message here is that linux was never historically associated to gaming or word processing. this is something it has acquired. whereas Windows was always from the getgo intended for these things. and i say this generally, windows has always about being where the profit was. if that was the office it was there. and if that was in games it was there to. just look at DirectX. does linux have an equivalent?
ok, maybe i live in a hole and while often girls might not be interested that you co-wrote a component of a particular linux distro, why do you think that people can not appreciate the details? besides mister open letter man, its the details that make open-source code so nice. even while you might not have the glamor, everyone can see your code. just point them to it. there is no need for a NDA. you can totally pimp that piece of code on your resume. not only can potential employers take a look at it, but they see exactly how relevant your code was to the project. this is important. you dont necessarily have to ride on the fame of your closed-source employer, you can make a name for yourself which lives on even if you are broke as shit. check this out: "im 34, im broke as shit, and i worked as MS on a project i cant talk to you about until im dead, please hire me?" yea. you gotta love that BS.
...as i understand it, free software has always been a creative development and distribution model. a model afaik, is much more cost effective than closed-source alternatives. and this is felt even more with large development teams.
its like giving away the blueprints to a new car. the community use their own materials to build this car and then go ahead and drive it. they still need to buy gas and car parts. they still have to be compliant with standards. and as soon as they notice an anomaly they alert the community at large who then looks into it and fixes the issue. the end result is a car you are proud to drive not just because it was well made, but you feel you are a part of the process and that you have a voice in its development. you are not just a survey response or a trend analysis. your voice is not just want the market wants. your voice is right on the level with the engineers of the car. you drink beer together.
problems:
1) the meaning of 'my' changes with context
2) what is a 'wedding'?
3) does the software know the difference between a single photo, or many photos?
Slashdot Mirror
it is simple really. when an unsanctioned copy is made the copy becomes an outcast child and traditionally the parents and the rest of the community do not acknowledge your existence so if you are ever in a danger they can witness they will not help you. MS should not have to support unauthorized use of its software. that said, if the pirates can find a way to get access to those patches and even install them, that is fair game as well. if the outcast manages to find a way to survive on their own, then they are achieving the ultimate goal, that of preservation/survival. a world view shared by the parents and the rest of the community. they shun the outcast but not kill them. they leave it up to nature to decide the outcasts fate. obviously MS is not at all like the above imagery. MS would never consider it fair game that you have and use an unauthorized copy of windows xp. but still the outcast must fend for themselves. this is one point of view. another is where every copy of windows XP is supported by patches. simply because an unauthorized copy of windows xp can exist on a network connected to authorized copies of windows xp. now if only the authorized copies recieved patches that would leave the unauthorized copies vulnerable effectively making the whole network icnreasingly susceptible to exploitation by worms and viruses. supporting every copy by giving authorized copies several dedicated sources to download from, and the unauthorized get a lousy .torrent . this way MS gains more control over the image of its product. less negative press can occur because of exploitation simply by supporting unauthorized copies.
But I've had this nasty itch for a couple months now....
how is it possible for a manufacturer to make a product and sell it when it is such a fundamental problem? what kind of quality standards are these manufacturers catering to? is it cheaper to produce and sell buggy hardware than it is to develop quality hardware and produce and sell it?
i remember using redhat 6 on my old presario laptop. i remember having issues with the suondcard. in fact i had a similar issue. the sound would work for a few seconds then stop. it was always like this with each session. i read up on my cards drivers in the linux kernel docs and found that there are some special settings that needed to be set. i configured my card, reloaded the kernel module and lo and behold i never had a problem since. when i tried the same card in freebsd i have the same trouble. not that the drivers didnt work, but that i had some extra settings to tweak because my card supported those extra features. one included how the card handled buffered streams. this card was an ESS 1688. tricky card if you ask me. today i have a new system. nforce2 based. the only thing i have idea whether it works is the nvidia MCP eth card. and i think that might be due to lack of drivers which nvidia doesnt want to give out or something like that. everything else works. OUT OF THE BOX. to make matters even more interesting most of my media works in windows xp and linux (slackware 9.1.0) i cant find a media type that doesnt have support in linux. my only problem is .doc i want to be able to work with anything MS can output, but right now its still a little tricky. all that said, the only reason i keep windows is simply for games and homework. i dont trust it for anything else. i have lost to much data to windows crashing in the past that i periodically move my homework and save game files onto my linux parition just incase. so far i have lost whole albums i ripped to my computer in wma format during software upgrades. windows xp is a pain in my ass.
so if you ever read this langa, you are simply wrong. look deeper into your setup. most of the answers are right there. can you at least point out WHY your soundcard doesnt work in linux? you opint out a software problem, you ever thought of a user config problem? plus you seem to have forgotten that most manufactures develop FOR WIDNOWS! their drivers are designed to work best with windows. they send their drivers to be bundled in with windows to give the appearance that peripherals work out of the box. truth of the matter, i have some hardware here that windows can not support natively. hardware that would not work correctly without the manufactures drivers. and depending on how well the manufacture makes their drivers i usually have to keep updating my drivers with each new release to benefit from the improvements. i dont quite see that as much of an alternative lifestyle. ill tell you this though, once i got my soundcard workin on my laptop, i never had an issue with it. that's why i like linux. its reliable when configured properly.
mind you if your opinion is that this is the achilles heel because it requires users to configure their own systems even after an install, remember that windows gets all that work done for them in great part by the manufactures developping drivers that WILL WORK with windows. you dont see that many manufactures making drivers for any distro or any version of the linux kernel. windows has years of support in this form. linux does not. and in the time linux has come i think it is infinetly more usable than DOS ever was. anyways.
you ever wondered by certain things are easier in windows? maybe that is because so many hardware manufacturers develop for windows and nothing else. try getting said printer working in BeOS which is even easier to use that windows/macos/linux. if the drivers do not exist, hardware will not work as well.
.net. this way you can write their application add whatever semantics each OS requires, and then compile for many targets. its not the best solution, but they need to start doing this while they are in the development phase.
so i would say a unified driver interface would be something that OSes need to have so that compiling the drivers for a particular OS is as simple as compiling the driver from within said OS and distributing the binaries. less work for OS developers all they have to do is buy into the unified driver interface and voila.
with that taken care off, all that remains is the unified toolkit interface. you write one application and you can deploy it in any OS environment. sounds a bit like java. but even C could have fit the bill. remember back when C was supposed to be the unifying language of unix. nowadays porting a program written in C though it can be done one often encounters a few snags.
X works. it just needs drivers that are on the same quality level as their counterparts in windows. X has features in it that windows XP only now incorporated. think: remote desktop. X has this remoteness builtin its an old feature in X. Y doesnt necessarily solve any of those issues. but hey, i hope Y does well.
i would say that what the unixes of the world need is a clean driver interface, something on par with what netbsd has. this will once and for all take care of the driver issue.
for packages we need a standard filesystem layout that all the main distros support and follow. then it doesnt matter whether you use rpm, deb, or tarballs. whats important is that each of those package management schemes keep a human-readable (probably in xml) database that keeps track of where each file in each package was installed. this way it matters less what package manager you use, since there is a standard methodology for handling packages. package managers can still be unique as they generally incorporate a distribution model (debs especially) but the put the really important files in the same place respecting the filesystem layout standard. this takes care of your installation/uninstallation issue.
as for toolkit. developers need a unified toolkit that will allow them to either target a particular toolkit such as qt/kde or gtk/gnome or cocoa, or
DirectX/PS2/Cube they are all platforms that games. a toolkit is necessary that emulates each one of those so that game developers can simply recompile for their target OS and have the game ready for OSes such as linux.
but all this is really just fluff. linux has already achieved. as an OS it is excellent for servers and desktops. its ability to support hardware has always been there. it just sucks when you spend most of your time reverse engineering hardware you own so it can run with the OS of your choice. so the OS is already ready and now going places.
it is the other projects you are talking about when you say Linux can catch up with Windows. desktop environment projects. application projects. lets remember the context. windows is a corporation where they pay their programmers to make these software apps. that's ALL they do. open source developers often work on these projects in their spare time and have day jobs. a few lucky ones get paid for the work they do. if everyone got paid what they deserved for the work they did then this would be an ideal world wouldnt it? but that is not the initial reason these developers are working on these projects, they are doing this because they are passionate about it (at least i think so). part of the development process is users submitting bug reports and and code that helps their own efforts. granted not everyone can program (i cant), but still, being a
hehehe, i have not be known to be able to translate some of my ideas into their correct forms in english or to even think through some of the implications of the thoughts i have. at the time though, i imagined a system that presented the most intuitive interface for the task i wished to accomplish. take for example a black box computer. you tell it what to do, point it to the resources you specifically want it to use, and let it do the rest. but then again, i am probably thinking of something that is pretty much AI. sorry i hurt your head ;)
i like this idea. maybe words can have their own default config files as well. so searching for a particular thing for example "pictures of horses" can be properly parsed into only returning instances of pictures of horses. or something like "pictures of horses but not brown ones".
you're right, i wasnt paying attention to the UI consistency.
there is nothing wrong with using different metaphors for different tasks. if the computer detects less than a certain number of files, the user can be presented, by default, with a spatial interface.
more files and we have the extended navigational interface. with remote filesystems the user can be presented with a simpler navigational interface with special buttons that relate to the type of network environment the filesystem exists in.
the computer can do all that, and the user can benefit.
If only the author of the article had gotten of a with of this neat little iPod + File Sharing idea.
give an iPod wireless capabilities so that it would 1) distribute files to other iPods "sans fils" 2) synchronize with other iPods so they all play the same song at the same time and depending on who in that particular configuration is designated as DJ etc etc the other iPods follow suit. im sure someone else has thought about this.
it would make sense then for universities to act as local wholesalers. the uni gets a copy of the latest beta or linux iso and stores them on a dedicated server. the students then do not have to worry about taking up the bandwidth of the uni connection to the net. in the future, students could pay the uni possibly a flat rate or something like that to access the dedicated server and download whatever commercial software is hosted on the server. i think its a good idea to do it this way, but this is only one of hte many ways to use bittorrent as a distribution method.
maybe you fail to remember how much history windows has with those things. linux was never a gaming platform, neither was it (historically) lauded for tis office suite. linux has had to do some serious catching up. even macosx makes use of MSoffice because at the very least this is what most people know.
as for games, it is a matter of (historical) demand. a company is less inclined to create games or software for linux, when they have to invest enough time and money developping on tried-and-true platforms. why develop for linux when the return on invest is going to be minial.
the other thing is perception. linux is NOT perceived as a desktop operating system. when you talk about linux, many will think first of it as a server. and more often than not this is what linux is used as. some kind of advertising and marketing needs to be done to create the percpetion that linux is a desktop OS that millions of people use in their daily lives and that those people would be willing to pay for games if they were developped for linux.
as for hardware support...that's up to the hardware companies to release drivers for linux. personally i dont think it would be to expensive for them to do this, but then again why should they when their return on investment comes from people using Windows.
the important message here is that linux was never historically associated to gaming or word processing. this is something it has acquired. whereas Windows was always from the getgo intended for these things. and i say this generally, windows has always about being where the profit was. if that was the office it was there. and if that was in games it was there to. just look at DirectX. does linux have an equivalent?
ok, maybe i live in a hole and while often girls might not be interested that you co-wrote a component of a particular linux distro, why do you think that people can not appreciate the details? besides mister open letter man, its the details that make open-source code so nice. even while you might not have the glamor, everyone can see your code. just point them to it. there is no need for a NDA. you can totally pimp that piece of code on your resume. not only can potential employers take a look at it, but they see exactly how relevant your code was to the project. this is important. you dont necessarily have to ride on the fame of your closed-source employer, you can make a name for yourself which lives on even if you are broke as shit. check this out: "im 34, im broke as shit, and i worked as MS on a project i cant talk to you about until im dead, please hire me?" yea. you gotta love that BS.
...as i understand it, free software has always been a creative development and distribution model. a model afaik, is much more cost effective than closed-source alternatives. and this is felt even more with large development teams. its like giving away the blueprints to a new car. the community use their own materials to build this car and then go ahead and drive it. they still need to buy gas and car parts. they still have to be compliant with standards. and as soon as they notice an anomaly they alert the community at large who then looks into it and fixes the issue. the end result is a car you are proud to drive not just because it was well made, but you feel you are a part of the process and that you have a voice in its development. you are not just a survey response or a trend analysis. your voice is not just want the market wants. your voice is right on the level with the engineers of the car. you drink beer together.
but if i waited for others to pay me for my free speech i doubt i would speak very much on anything vaguely relevant.
problems: 1) the meaning of 'my' changes with context 2) what is a 'wedding'? 3) does the software know the difference between a single photo, or many photos?