it'll be like when the manufacturing and steel industries moved overseas to Russia and Japan and elsewhere.
The one problem with stuff like this is letting business move anywhere it damn well pleases is is better for both economies concerned on a broad scale, it can really fuck over specific areas for a long time. I'm definitely better off with cheap foreign steel, but Scranton, PA for example is pretty much fscked.
I don't think that IT outsourcing is going to create blight areas the way mill closings did - MCSEs have a lot more options than assembly-line workers. But I wonder. A lot of Lisp people still haven't got over the AI winter, even if it was largely their own fault.
Slashdot moderators continue their retarded game of anti-Americanism by modding this gratuitous and orthographically-mongoloid eurosuck whining 'Insightful'.
Programming a proprietory software package $55,000 Programming an Open Source sofware package -$20,000... I wonder which one i'm going to choose. Don't mod me down, thats avoiding the issue. How about you put your mouth where your modpoints are.
No one said you had to quit your day job and start your own whole goddamn Linux distribution; that's a special case.
And, moreover, many more people have gone much broker trying to start their own companies.
"Depend upon it, Sir, this is mere talk. Who is ruined by gaming? You will not find six instances in an age. There is a strange rout made about deep play: whereas you have many more people ruined by adventurous trade, and yet we do not hear such an outcry against it." - Samuel Johnson
wishful thinking on your part. - No. If license weren't an issue I'd far rather use Qt than GTK+.
I've seen KDE grow and grow and grow in maturity and users the past few years.
Guess what? Gnome's grown faster. It's gone from majorly sucking to being about comparable to KDE. Whereas KDE went from pretty good to reasonably polished. Bigger leap on Gnome's part cuz Sun didn't want to pay Trolltech licenses and sent their UI engineers to Gnome.
Apple? - Apple uses one KPart. BFD.
Mandrake?
Lindows? - These are both bad examples; Lindows is basically a hobbyist distro and Mandrake is close to it.
I'll give you a good example though: SuSE. SuSE is KDE only - for the home edition. The corporate one comes with Gnome support also. And when you install Ximian (so you can use easily Red Carpet and all the other management tools that Novell is providing for SuSE) it basically removes all visible sign of KDE even existing.
As I said, KDE is fast becoming a toy/hobbyist platform. Except maybe in Germany, which also happens to have a big Amiga-nostalgist scene.
Almost every document on the site is aguest column from a small-time newspaper or non-academic magazine. There are also a lot of recordings from radio shows.
None of them contain original research; this particular article just takes some figures from another institution's report and makes ludicrous extrapolations therefrom.
One of the "fellows" is one John Norquist, the brother of a bigger-time conservative activist named Grover Norquist. The "senior fellow" is James Kilpatrick, who made a name for himself in the sixties writing op-ed pieces opposed to civil rights legislation.
In short, it's a handout program for has-been or never-were conservative pundits.
On the one hand it is a good thing that Havoc et al. are willing to make strong choices and not just clutter up the desktop with every conceivable option. This is a big reason why I don't use KDE.
On the other hand, good UI is based on what users do. Of late, several decisions have been made based on a kind of fundamentalist interpretation of the HIG. They need to be pushed back on these decisions, and lots of Nautilus windows by default without an obvious shutoff mechanism is the biggest one.
I agree absolutely. I think we've gone beyond the stage of it being useful having two competing desktops.
Good thing that one of them's saddled with a bipolar too-free/not-free-enough Rube Goldberg license and has been shunned by all the major (non-German) corporate Linux backers.
KDE is dying a slow death. Shiny, pretty, popular among Linux fans, easy to develop for. And yet fast becoming a toy platform.
Please by all means shoot the messenger by modding this Troll or Flamebait.
Free software makes no logical sense, because people do it out of altruism
Right. Super-altruists like IBM and Sun.
and stupidity.
Although the commies certainly proved themselves leaders in this field, there's nothing anticapitalist about stupidity.
Free software is not capitalism, and it doesn't fit. Capitalism assumes that people want to be reimbursed in some way.
Companies regularly have loss-leader products (give away the razor and sell the blades) that they don't expect to get meaningful reimbursement for. That's part of capitalism. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
The companies who are investing in Free Software (I'm using the GNU-approved term instead of Open Source just to annoy you, by the way) are making a comparable bet. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't; you're pretty sure it won't.
But failures are a big part of capitalism. If we banned bad business models, we'd basically be "picking winners" and setting an "industrial policty": which means you're veering into Mondale/Dukakis territory, binky.
Hey, here's an idea, Mr. Capitalist-Libertarian-Ayn Rand-fanboy: if you don't like Free Software why don't you make a law against it? Oh wait.
Half the links on the homepage are broken. The ones that do work lead you to a bunch of op-ed essays and recorded radio broadcasts, all attributed to about half a dozen names.
What does Google have that Microsoft cannot duplicate, buy or steal, given enough time and resources?
Google's corporate culture has valued technical r&d and clean user interfaces more than Microsoft's. Google also has a better reputation.
These are important when you run a search engine that users want to get to, find what they need, and get out of without any fuss; and when they can set their homepage to something else with a few mouseclicks.
Google could lose these at any time, but Microsoft is unlikely to gain them.
Have you seen the new incarnation of Microsoft Works? It seems to use IE's XML/HTML renderer for most of the display work. It's all still on your local machine, but would be far easier to make distributed than old-style Office apps.
The next generation of Playstation and the GameCube could replace the PC in many homes.
Been claimed for years. Not gonna happen. Making a Playstation a general-purpose computer means introducing more complexity, which means headaches. Gamers don't want that (which is why attempts have failed) and gaming companies don't want that.
All your data would be stored on servers and you would log into your collection of apps and data from anywhere.
Oh, right. Cuz everyone loves subscription-model software pricing. And you get the added bonus of not owning your data any more.
These ideas suck. Which is why I'm glad IBM isn't pushing them. If you RTFA it's very clear that this is meant for enterprise environment: you have the apps living on the server down the hall rather than installed on every Joe User's PC. But it's flexible so that it can also run by itself on your laptop and then sync up when you plug it back in.
1. Developer makes application 2. Retarded marketing droid distills into buzzwords 3. Even more retarded CNet monkey-reporter distills buzzwords into "story" 4. ??? 5. Profit!
Seriously, have you ever used a Websphere application? It's something different entirely from CGI scripting or the kind of little toy Java applets you play on your browser.
Goddamn you American Eurosuck fanboys who don't even know anything about Europe. Next time you go off on one of your toad-lick Americans-are-stupid whines, check your facts.
As it turns out, the Euro people love reality TV even more than we do, and pioneered the concept. American Idol was Pop Idol in Britain before it came to the US. Survivor started out in Sweden: that's right, in the land of SAABs, socialist everything and legal child porn that you suckasses love to idolize. Big Brother flopped in America, but is huge in every EU country; moreover it's Gro Haarlem Brundtland's personal favorite show!!!
In testing with OpenOffice and Ximian desktop at my company, users fucking hated OpenOffice. One lady actually slapped the monitor in disgust while trying to put together an only moderately complex table in OpenOffice Writer. They did, however, like the option to save as PDF.
Users did, however, report that they liked the GUI.
"Down side, you would be stuck with Java in order to get the fullest functionality, and some people feel that Linux is "just being used", transparently, to leverage the cookie-cutter Intel hardware at the moment, and that Solaris X86 might replace it at some point."
The Java Desktop System is basically by Sun's own admission a hook toget you to buy their Java Enterprise System infrastructure stack(and by extension, Sparc/Solaris servers, probably).
JES (formerly ONE) is supposed to proved web & applications serving, identity management, and email/calendaring type stuff. So basically it competes with Websphere/Tivoli/Notes, Netware/Groupwise and ASP/Windows networking/Outlook.
JDS is just a pre-configured client for this stack. Linux just happens to be a cheap and flexible base on which to build it.
So the real question is, how good is the server stuff? No idea. That's what I'd really like to see reviews of on Slashdot.
With a few exceptions, such as the System management tools, most of these features can be found in a normal linux system. I'm obviously missing something here?
You got the system management tools part, which is more than the average reviewer of JDS 1 got. Pretty much all of them read like this:
Sun's Java Desktop System is not as good as Mandrake for installing on your home machine to run an IRC server. Also, I had a hard time setting the wallpaper to be naked Manga girls. Maybe it would be good at a company or something.
Don't let this happen to you! If you review this product, talk about how it'd be in an enterprise setting or don't review it at all. My suspicion is that it's still overhyped if you do take this into account, but I'd at least like to find out.
For example, if you're reviewing a distro that's explicitly aimed solely at the corporate desktop, don't for Christ's sake say something like:
Sun's Java Desktop System is not as good as Mandrake for installing on your home machine to run an IRC server. Also, I had a hard time setting the wallpaper to be my favorite naked Manga girls. Maybe it would be good at a company or something.
Slashdot Mirror
it'll be like when the manufacturing and steel industries moved overseas to Russia and Japan and elsewhere.
The one problem with stuff like this is letting business move anywhere it damn well pleases is is better for both economies concerned on a broad scale, it can really fuck over specific areas for a long time. I'm definitely better off with cheap foreign steel, but Scranton, PA for example is pretty much fscked.
I don't think that IT outsourcing is going to create blight areas the way mill closings did - MCSEs have a lot more options than assembly-line workers. But I wonder. A lot of Lisp people still haven't got over the AI winter, even if it was largely their own fault.
Slashdot moderators continue their retarded game of anti-Americanism by modding this gratuitous and orthographically-mongoloid eurosuck whining 'Insightful'.
Programming a proprietory software package $55,000 Programming an Open Source sofware package -$20,000... I wonder which one i'm going to choose. Don't mod me down, thats avoiding the issue. How about you put your mouth where your modpoints are.
No one said you had to quit your day job and start your own whole goddamn Linux distribution; that's a special case.
And, moreover, many more people have gone much broker trying to start their own companies.
"Depend upon it, Sir, this is mere talk. Who is ruined by gaming? You will not find six instances in an age. There is a strange rout made about deep play: whereas you have many more people ruined by adventurous trade, and yet we do not hear such an outcry against it." - Samuel Johnson
wishful thinking on your part. - No. If license weren't an issue I'd far rather use Qt than GTK+.
I've seen KDE grow and grow and grow in maturity and users the past few years.
Guess what? Gnome's grown faster. It's gone from majorly sucking to being about comparable to KDE. Whereas KDE went from pretty good to reasonably polished. Bigger leap on Gnome's part cuz Sun didn't want to pay Trolltech licenses and sent their UI engineers to Gnome.
Apple? - Apple uses one KPart. BFD.
Mandrake? Lindows? - These are both bad examples; Lindows is basically a hobbyist distro and Mandrake is close to it.
I'll give you a good example though: SuSE. SuSE is KDE only - for the home edition. The corporate one comes with Gnome support also. And when you install Ximian (so you can use easily Red Carpet and all the other management tools that Novell is providing for SuSE) it basically removes all visible sign of KDE even existing.
As I said, KDE is fast becoming a toy/hobbyist platform. Except maybe in Germany, which also happens to have a big Amiga-nostalgist scene.
Almost every document on the site is aguest column from a small-time newspaper or non-academic magazine. There are also a lot of recordings from radio shows.
None of them contain original research; this particular article just takes some figures from another institution's report and makes ludicrous extrapolations therefrom.
One of the "fellows" is one John Norquist, the brother of a bigger-time conservative activist named Grover Norquist. The "senior fellow" is James Kilpatrick, who made a name for himself in the sixties writing op-ed pieces opposed to civil rights legislation.
In short, it's a handout program for has-been or never-were conservative pundits.
I practically cried I was so happy to upgrade to 95.
I definitely cried when I upgraded to 98. A lot. A lot a lot. Worst Windows EVAR.
I agree.
On the one hand it is a good thing that Havoc et al. are willing to make strong choices and not just clutter up the desktop with every conceivable option. This is a big reason why I don't use KDE.
On the other hand, good UI is based on what users do. Of late, several decisions have been made based on a kind of fundamentalist interpretation of the HIG. They need to be pushed back on these decisions, and lots of Nautilus windows by default without an obvious shutoff mechanism is the biggest one.
I agree absolutely. I think we've gone beyond the stage of it being useful having two competing desktops.
Good thing that one of them's saddled with a bipolar too-free/not-free-enough Rube Goldberg license and has been shunned by all the major (non-German) corporate Linux backers.
KDE is dying a slow death. Shiny, pretty, popular among Linux fans, easy to develop for. And yet fast becoming a toy platform.
Please by all means shoot the messenger by modding this Troll or Flamebait.
Free software makes no logical sense, because people do it out of altruism
Right. Super-altruists like IBM and Sun.
and stupidity.
Although the commies certainly proved themselves leaders in this field, there's nothing anticapitalist about stupidity.
Free software is not capitalism, and it doesn't fit. Capitalism assumes that people want to be reimbursed in some way.
Companies regularly have loss-leader products (give away the razor and sell the blades) that they don't expect to get meaningful reimbursement for. That's part of capitalism. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
The companies who are investing in Free Software (I'm using the GNU-approved term instead of Open Source just to annoy you, by the way) are making a comparable bet. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't; you're pretty sure it won't.
But failures are a big part of capitalism. If we banned bad business models, we'd basically be "picking winners" and setting an "industrial policty": which means you're veering into Mondale/Dukakis territory, binky.
Hey, here's an idea, Mr. Capitalist-Libertarian-Ayn Rand-fanboy: if you don't like Free Software why don't you make a law against it? Oh wait.
Half the links on the homepage are broken. The ones that do work lead you to a bunch of op-ed essays and recorded radio broadcasts, all attributed to about half a dozen names.
The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute may officially be non-partisan, but it's basically a jobs program for second-tier Neoconservatives.
What does Google have that Microsoft cannot duplicate, buy or steal, given enough time and resources?
Google's corporate culture has valued technical r&d and clean user interfaces more than Microsoft's. Google also has a better reputation.
These are important when you run a search engine that users want to get to, find what they need, and get out of without any fuss; and when they can set their homepage to something else with a few mouseclicks.
Google could lose these at any time, but Microsoft is unlikely to gain them.
Have you seen the new incarnation of Microsoft Works? It seems to use IE's XML/HTML renderer for most of the display work. It's all still on your local machine, but would be far easier to make distributed than old-style Office apps.
The next generation of Playstation and the GameCube could replace the PC in many homes.
Been claimed for years. Not gonna happen. Making a Playstation a general-purpose computer means introducing more complexity, which means headaches. Gamers don't want that (which is why attempts have failed) and gaming companies don't want that.
All your data would be stored on servers and you would log into your collection of apps and data from anywhere.
Oh, right. Cuz everyone loves subscription-model software pricing. And you get the added bonus of not owning your data any more.
These ideas suck. Which is why I'm glad IBM isn't pushing them. If you RTFA it's very clear that this is meant for enterprise environment: you have the apps living on the server down the hall rather than installed on every Joe User's PC. But it's flexible so that it can also run by itself on your laptop and then sync up when you plug it back in.
1. Developer makes application
2. Retarded marketing droid distills into buzzwords
3. Even more retarded CNet monkey-reporter distills buzzwords into "story"
4. ???
5. Profit!
Seriously, have you ever used a Websphere application? It's something different entirely from CGI scripting or the kind of little toy Java applets you play on your browser.
How do you figure?
See a lot of competition going on?
Seriously, not too long ago there were DOS/Windows, WindowsNT, OS/2, a bazillion flavor of Unix, VMS, Amiga, BeOS, MacOS Classic, etc.
Now there's basically two OSes: Windows NT and Unix.
If it were only a matter of non-M$ products getting pushed out of the marketplace, you might be right to be skeptical. But:
1. MS's own OS offerings have converged around one kernel (the VMS-derivative NT)
2. The non-MS space has converged around Unix.
So clearly something more than the malfeasance of one corporation is at work here: hence "natural monopoly."
PS: parent modded 3 insightful? wtf???
Goddamn you American Eurosuck fanboys who don't even know anything about Europe. Next time you go off on one of your toad-lick Americans-are-stupid whines, check your facts.
As it turns out, the Euro people love reality TV even more than we do, and pioneered the concept. American Idol was Pop Idol in Britain before it came to the US. Survivor started out in Sweden: that's right, in the land of SAABs, socialist everything and legal child porn that you suckasses love to idolize. Big Brother flopped in America, but is huge in every EU country; moreover it's Gro Haarlem Brundtland's personal favorite show!!!
In conclusion, f you.
You're German, aren't you
No.
In testing with OpenOffice and Ximian desktop at my company, users fucking hated OpenOffice. One lady actually slapped the monitor in disgust while trying to put together an only moderately complex table in OpenOffice Writer. They did, however, like the option to save as PDF.
Users did, however, report that they liked the GUI.
"Down side, you would be stuck with Java in order to get the fullest functionality, and some people feel that Linux is "just being used", transparently, to leverage the cookie-cutter Intel hardware at the moment, and that Solaris X86 might replace it at some point."
The Java Desktop System is basically by Sun's own admission a hook to get you to buy their Java Enterprise System infrastructure stack (and by extension, Sparc/Solaris servers, probably).
JES (formerly ONE) is supposed to proved web & applications serving, identity management, and email/calendaring type stuff. So basically it competes with Websphere/Tivoli/Notes, Netware/Groupwise and ASP/Windows networking/Outlook.
JDS is just a pre-configured client for this stack. Linux just happens to be a cheap and flexible base on which to build it.
So the real question is, how good is the server stuff? No idea. That's what I'd really like to see reviews of on Slashdot.
With a few exceptions, such as the System management tools, most of these features can be found in a normal linux system. I'm obviously missing something here?
You got the system management tools part, which is more than the average reviewer of JDS 1 got. Pretty much all of them read like this:
Sun's Java Desktop System is not as good as Mandrake for installing on your home machine to run an IRC server. Also, I had a hard time setting the wallpaper to be naked Manga girls. Maybe it would be good at a company or something.
Don't let this happen to you! If you review this product, talk about how it'd be in an enterprise setting or don't review it at all. My suspicion is that it's still overhyped if you do take this into account, but I'd at least like to find out.
Ah. I thought it'd gone dead. Thanks.
For example, if you're reviewing a distro that's explicitly aimed solely at the corporate desktop, don't for Christ's sake say something like:
Don't let this happen to you!
While it uses KDE by default, it's easy to switch to Gnome.
When I tried this (at a time when I admittedly knew much less about Linux) I found this not to be the case. Is there a Knoppix->Gnome faq out there?