If I was a phisher I would have an identical button do the same (looking) thing. No one would know. The three questions are even more worthless because all you'd have to do is code pages to look the same and ACCEPT ANY RESPONSE. That way not only do you have bank information of the person but you also have the answer to 3 PERSONAL QUESTIONS OF YOUR CHOICE. Like what is your SSN, Drivers License #, and Credit Card #.
This won't stop scammers, it may even help them with identity theft.
1. 404
2. Articles are frequent dupes
3. Roland Piquepaille advertisements
4. Broken Code (on the main page)
5. You can't edit your comments
6. Poor spelling/grammar (in articles)
7. The moderation system
8. Sluggish server responses (being slashdotted)
9. Flamebait articles designed to start holy wars
10. Stories no one cares about.
What common slashdot problem pisses you off the most?
1. 404
2. Dupe
3. Roland Piquepaille
4. Broken Code
5. You can't edit your comments
6. Poor spelling (in articles)
7. Poor grammmar (in articles)
8. Stories no one cares about.
If is isn't enough to publish dupes everyday, now BROKEN CODE made it onto the front page.
Are you sure that Zonk checked this?
It should read "News Corp announced on Monday that it, owner of the popular MySpace.com social networking site, for $580 million. This follows an announcement by News Corp on Friday that it is creating an Internet division to hold the company's sports, news and entertainment sites."
The problem is this creates bad incentives. Like NOT putting an unsubscribe button. Or even worse, putting some legitimate site as the unsubscribe button. Then they could use (or redirect) this massive DDOS at anywhere they wanted. Send 1 million spam emails directed at SCO.com and SCO.com gets 10 million unsubscribe requests. That is very very dangerous.
I hate to contradict parent poster (ok I don't really) but this WILL NOT BE A PORTABLE MOVIE PLAYER. I'm not sure that a video iPod would get hacked, (there is still no OGG support on iPods, so why would MPEG2 support be so forthcoming??).
This functionality will only be for crap quality.mov music videos. The quality will be crap so that no one feeds it to a TV and so file downloads and transfers to iPod don't take forever. Think 320 X 480 tops.
Even if someone did hack it to play divx, it won't be useful because of the weakenss of the CPU. Uploading higher res video won't play, not because of codecs, but because apple (if they know what is good for them) there won't be enough cpu cycles. MPEG4 (a la DIVX/XVID) is especially cpu intensive, which is why it is so compressed.
See here for some other reasons, but this is not what you think it is.
No grandparent poster is right. No one wants to use a computer to serve video from an iPod to a TV. Too many components. These small cables are much easier.
On the other side I doubt this is what apple wants people to use the iPod for. P2PNet has a good post listing why this isn't what you think. Apple knows a video iPod would get hacked to play nearly anything (though any mpeg4 video like xvid/divx is probably too cpu intensive to work) to play on it. This functionality will be for crap quality.mov music videos.
The quality will be crap so that no one feeds it to a TV, so you don't need a fast processesor to run it, and so file downloads and transfers to iPod don't take forever. Uploading higher resolution video won't play, not because of codecs, but because there won't be enough cpu cycles.
Best case scenario: this is great because it will this be a nail in the coffin for widespread Longhorn adoption. Thus companies like Dell may sell computers equipped with Linux to avoid higher hardware fees. I wrote about this while back.
Worst case scenario: this is a brick wall for Linux drivers. Linux will be reduced to working only on specialty or old hardware.
This idea is old. The NYT guy may have come up with it on his own, but it has been stated before. Even here on slashdot . The other article is better written. If you are believer in straight utilitarian economics it makes sense. If something else (arbitrary or collective morality etc) it is rediculous. Half tongue in cheek Steven Landsburg is a utilitarian economist.
Dupe me once, shame on you. Dupe me twice, shame on me. Dupe me everyday, this must be slashdot.
The real problem with mispelling on slashdot is this: if you make a reasonably insightful post, but you have grammar errors, guess what people respond to. The ideas you post are completely ignored and the spelling is blasted. It makes it easy to get off a quick easy response without even thinking, and isn't that what everyone wants to do?
Parent post is right on. With a little bit of thinking you can see that we cannot use our own brains to understand themselves. To fully comprehend something you must be greater than it, a little philosophy will teach you this. That isn't to say we aren't greater than anything we haven't understood yet, but that an internal system cannot understand itself from without. And you must be without to understand the true strength size and capacity of a system. You can't see the strength of the walls of a castle without leaving it. You can't understand the brilliance of the brain without leaving it and leaving it isn't possible.
Sadly this release once again breaks fairkeys and DeDRMS by Jon Lech Johanson. And with him employed by Apple now, he can't re-break them because it would be divulging a trade secret.
It is legal to reverse engineer for compatibility if you don't have inside information. It is not ok if you do. It is sad, but a good move for Apple.
The eminent domain ruling IS A BIG CHANGE. Before state/city/county/federal government could take your land IF IT WAS FOR A PUBLIC USE. Like a school or park or something that the government was developing.
What makes this decision insane is that now the state/city/county/federal government can take your land FOR ANY REASON. If they want to take your land (of course they 'reimburse' you for it) and sell/give it to a private company for development it os ok.
That is DIFFERENT AND BAD. If they want a bar/casino/whatever where your house is YOU WILL BE FORCED TO LEAVE. It is important to note who populates local government. Local community leaders. Think a Chaney/Haliburton relationship. If I own a local chain, I'm on local government and I want you to move; if I can convince my local buddies it is ok, you are gone.
In short it offers terrific opportunities for corruption.
If you want the ruling reversed (since the mostly liberal judges voted for it, mostly conservative judges against) all you'd have to do is get some right-wing nut-job local government, in Texas for example, to bulldoze all the Planned Parenthoods, and sell the land to gun dealers or churches. That might change the liberal judges minds a bit.
Interesting idea. Credits for bandwidth. The problem I see, is this. What will they allow you do with a credit?
If you can get new songs with it, I can easily see someone with a big pipe seeding the popular songs to get the ones they really want. If you offer anything other than new songs, no one will seed. 'Access to exclusive videos' or cereal box gimmicks, won't get my bandwidth. And what is to stop someone from creating a garbage file named some popular song, give it the right md5 (or whatever) hash, and seed it?
I am sure they will retreat to the Napster idea of having centralized listing for the songs, so bandwidth & hosting costs will not be zero, they will be less. Napster had hundreds of servers before they went down. I say they will do this because this is the only way to control who gets what. You have to come to the central servers and for a cost (better be less than $.99 if they are getting rid of most bandwidth costs) your program gets a list of IP's hosting the song, and connects to them.
What'd really be smart is to use something akin to bittorrent for this. Let many people seed the song so rather than getting 'the fastest' connection, you (roughly) get the sum of the fastest connections. You wouldn't have 'poisoning' problems Kazaa does. You also could automatically pick up on a file if your connection drops out, or the other guys does (the bane of napster). If you controlled the trackers and just slighly modified bittorent so you never see the torrent file, (so you cannot redistribute access to the song) it'd be much better. Today's technology versus 5 years ago.
This is a good idea. Will it catch on with the public? Depends on how shiny the interface is, and how quickly they offer iPod friendly music. Will it catch on with smart people? DRM? Ahem, no thanks. I've got allofmp3.com.
What are we buying? Not the music/software/movie or else we could use it however we wanted. We buy a right to use the music/movie/software in a way prescribed by the copyright owner. If the prescribed mode of use is nuts (like iPods can only be used on windows/macs, one computer at a time and to switch computers you lose all your music), tough cookie.
This is the key. So many believe copyright exists to protect the company, its investment et cetera. NO WAY. Read the constitution, read anything pre-1990's.
Repeat after me, COPYRIGHTS EXIST TO BENEFIT PEOPLE NOT FIRMS. For pharmaceuticals they invest millions of dollars to innovate and get a product that improves the quality of life for people.
Should literature/music/movies/software (as a whole; none of these idiot Amazon double-click patents) be copyrighted? Of course, they take investment and improve the quality of life for people.
Have we gone overboard on the copyright? You bet. A CD has a much smaller benefit when A) it will be outmoded by the next digital format anyday now and you'll have to re-buy it. B) You can't use it how you want now that fair use has done down the toilet (i.e. rip it to your computer, make a backup copy, mix it with something else).
You know what? The studios want $20 per CD, I'd be willing to pay $20 if I was offered: a replacement when it broke or got too scratched up; a trade-in for a newer format when the format I purchased it in has become old; and I got to use it wherever I wanted.
Otherwise, I'll use allofmp3.com where if I lose the music or my cd gets too scratched up, I can afford to replace it. Fair use has suffered attrition beyond recognition or potency. Since we know we can't use it as we like (thus it is less valuable), it had better be cheap.
The key to solving this here is price separation. Which is something Americans/Europeans hate. Lets pretend the MPAA is able to do this (region encoding doesn't work). If the MPAA knows it costs $1 to make a DVD, but $100 million to make a movie, will they sell DVD's at $1.50? No, the volume isn't high enough for a low margin like that. But once they cover that $100 million, would they like to? Sure, if that person won't pay any more for it.
So they sell DVD's to Americans/Europeans for $20 and they sell DVD's to Singapore for $1.50. But wait, some of the Signapore DVD's are coming to America and the MPAA is undercutting itself and no longer able to cover the $100 million. So they can't sell them to Singapore cheap anymore. Singaporians can't afford $20 for a DVD so they pirate it.
This is the current situation. The way to get proper price separation is to get a rental model, or a pay per view model if you will. But people want to own their own movies, so they won't swallow that even if it is cheaper.
You can get around it by setting a bidding price. Have groups of individuals buy the movie for everyone. I make a great movie for $80 million. I release a trailer/teaser or better yet show it to some interested parties. I say "I will give this to you for $100 million." If people come up with the $100 million then it is released to everyone. If they don't, I may have to lower my price. (There is a freeriding problem here but this could be a great boon to the independent studios).
There are other ways to do this, but technology isn't the answer. It has never worked to fully price separate, because Americans/Europeans don't want to pay $20 if they can get it for $1.50 from Singapore. So someone will invent a way to get Singapore DVD's to America for less than $18.50 and Americans are happier and studios are livid.
Legislation is not the answer. Propoganda is not the answer. The answer is a new business model, but changing a beast like the MPAA/RIAA will take a lot more than anyone can put up (except our bought out government).
On the other hand, Gates says he has used firefox (and liked IE better). The guy who started the 'get the facts' flamewar (I forget his name) said in an interview right here on/. he has boxes running debian. Even Ballmer claims to have used linux. Et cetera et cetera.
I would guess most of the Linux user community has/does use windows. I don't know if that is true of the developer community (as these comments suggest it is not). Get with your end-users guys, please.
He says linux is getting just like microsoft. Ok I can see, graphically, some similarities. But what does he cite for evidence? Quick development cycles! Since when did M$ have quick development cycles!?! Lets see, XP - 2001, Longhorn - 2004, no 2005, wait how about 2006, yeah 2006 we promise. (We are just taking out the major reasons to switch, avalon, winFS, etc).
Linux in general does have fast development cycles admittedly, but not always. How long was it from Woody to Sarge (officially)?
The guy is clearly drumming up support for himself and OpenBSD. Stupidly enough he is attacking his potential user base! Free/Open/NetBSD is not end-user friendly. BSD users come from Linux, not Windows.
If I wanted to promote OpenBSD, I'd know Linux users are pretty smart. I'd Explain in non histerical and non insulting terms why it is great. Make some comparisons. Not attack those I wish to woo.
I'll be honest I am a little surprised with all the technical analysis (in the community not just here) of why one OS is better and why it is more useful. The audience this article (wrong as it is) is referring to is average end user who doesn't care (or understand) widgets, dependencies, chipsets etc, therefore not liable to be swayed by them.
Of course OSX will not run on your standard PC. Apple's status as a hardware/software provider has protected it from hardware undercutting from China that has hurt so many hardware companies as well as software undercutting in the form of piracy that has plagued software only companies. They'd really be stupid to abandon a safe position like that.
First the suggestion that Linux will be killed by OSX is ridiculous. There will always be a demand for free as in freedom OS from the niche group that Linux currently dominates. That won't change. Linux development will go one, the OS will mature, and people will use it. No one has resisted switching to OSX because it is on PPC (maybe because it won't run a favorite program but not because the chip architecture is different).
Second why did Apple switch? Will this enable more apps to run on OSX then did before? Probably not much. It may upset small companies who actually did write software for PPC but they will port the software over and stop complaining. In the end it was a pure bottom line decision, Macs are expensive and Jobs wants them cheaper.
Apple has some great buzz among the public now. Thanks to the Mini, iPod and Shuffle. Among developers it seems they respond with "meh" to the oncoming Apple onslaught. Should this goodwill with the general public continue to grow Apple may convert more people, but not in waves, and not because of a different chipset. An end user will still see a Mac as the same, just a bit cheaper than before. OSX will still only be on Mac machines, they will still look the same etc.
Who should be worried? No one. Life as usual. Windows users will still use Windows, Linux users will still use Linux, Mac users will still use Macs. Unless Apple can find someway to seemlessly run native Windows apps in OSX (if so the WINE folks would probably like to talk to these Mac wizards) Microsoft shouldn't worry.
Unless OSX gets a lot more geeky a la Linux (example, standard KDE icons, Emacs, Konsole) and open sourced (which hasn't seemed to draw much interest in Solaris) those who use Linux won't go elsewhere. To boot many went to Linux for the cost of software, practically nothing. OSX will not be free.
Who will switch to Apple? Who is Jobs shooting at? Only those who wanted Macs in the past but were unable to justify the cost. With Windows being a major cost in a generic PC today, Apple is poised to be comparable in price.
Acrobat is slow for one reason. Creeping featuritis. Nothing else, it is horrifically bloated. 7 is an improvement, but not muby.
On the upside there
are ways to speed Adobe Reader up without losing virtually any usability. XPDF and GhostVue seem to load them up pretty quick as well.
On the other hand OpenOffice 2.0 will (the beta already does) support making any file (ppt, doc, etc) into a multipage pdf or a swf file (slides advance with each click.
When you actually think about it, those who develop the linux kernel are about as sophisticated (computer wise) as you can get. The OSS community has reverse engineered dozens of proprietary formats, locked down much better than that of bitkeeper, for compatibility. BK had to know that: 1. OSS community doesn't like proprietary formats/software. 2. The OSS community is very good at reverse engineering formats.
And ultimately yes, the BK format would be reverse engineered for more freedom. It is like giving a beer to Homer Simpson and expecting him not to drink it.
Slashdot Mirror
If I was a phisher I would have an identical button do the same (looking) thing. No one would know. The three questions are even more worthless because all you'd have to do is code pages to look the same and ACCEPT ANY RESPONSE. That way not only do you have bank information of the person but you also have the answer to 3 PERSONAL QUESTIONS OF YOUR CHOICE. Like what is your SSN, Drivers License #, and Credit Card #.
This won't stop scammers, it may even help them with identity theft.
What about slashdot pisses you off the most?
1. 404
2. Articles are frequent dupes
3. Roland Piquepaille advertisements
4. Broken Code (on the main page)
5. You can't edit your comments
6. Poor spelling/grammar (in articles)
7. The moderation system
8. Sluggish server responses (being slashdotted)
9. Flamebait articles designed to start holy wars
10. Stories no one cares about.
What common slashdot problem pisses you off the most?
1. 404
2. Dupe
3. Roland Piquepaille
4. Broken Code
5. You can't edit your comments
6. Poor spelling (in articles) 7. Poor grammmar (in articles) 8. Stories no one cares about.
In other news slashcode offers a patch.
If is isn't enough to publish dupes everyday, now BROKEN CODE made it onto the front page.
Are you sure that Zonk checked this?
It should read "News Corp announced on Monday that it, owner of the popular MySpace.com social networking site, for $580 million. This follows an announcement by News Corp on Friday that it is creating an Internet division to hold the company's sports, news and entertainment sites."
That is the funniest "informative" I've ever seen.
The problem is this creates bad incentives. Like NOT putting an unsubscribe button. Or even worse, putting some legitimate site as the unsubscribe button. Then they could use (or redirect) this massive DDOS at anywhere they wanted. Send 1 million spam emails directed at SCO.com and SCO.com gets 10 million unsubscribe requests. That is very very dangerous.
I hate to contradict parent poster (ok I don't really) but this WILL NOT BE A PORTABLE MOVIE PLAYER. I'm not sure that a video iPod would get hacked, (there is still no OGG support on iPods, so why would MPEG2 support be so forthcoming??).
.mov music videos. The quality will be crap so that no one feeds it to a TV and so file downloads and transfers to iPod don't take forever. Think 320 X 480 tops.
This functionality will only be for crap quality
Even if someone did hack it to play divx, it won't be useful because of the weakenss of the CPU. Uploading higher res video won't play, not because of codecs, but because apple (if they know what is good for them) there won't be enough cpu cycles. MPEG4 (a la DIVX/XVID) is especially cpu intensive, which is why it is so compressed.
See here for some other reasons, but this is not what you think it is.
No grandparent poster is right. No one wants to use a computer to serve video from an iPod to a TV. Too many components. These small cables are much easier.
On the other side I doubt this is what apple wants people to use the iPod for. P2PNet has a good post listing why this isn't what you think. Apple knows a video iPod would get hacked to play nearly anything (though any mpeg4 video like xvid/divx is probably too cpu intensive to work) to play on it. This functionality will be for crap quality
The quality will be crap so that no one feeds it to a TV, so you don't need a fast processesor to run it, and so file downloads and transfers to iPod don't take forever. Uploading higher resolution video won't play, not because of codecs, but because there won't be enough cpu cycles.
Continuing the DRM happy news, Microsoft wants to end hardware copyright circumvention with Longhorn. This scheme would require new monitors, and entirely different hardware requirements.
Best case scenario: this is great because it will this be a nail in the coffin for widespread Longhorn adoption. Thus companies like Dell may sell computers equipped with Linux to avoid higher hardware fees. I wrote about this while back.
Worst case scenario: this is a brick wall for Linux drivers. Linux will be reduced to working only on specialty or old hardware.
This idea is old. The NYT guy may have come up with it on his own, but it has been stated before. Even here on slashdot . The other article is better written. If you are believer in straight utilitarian economics it makes sense. If something else (arbitrary or collective morality etc) it is rediculous. Half tongue in cheek Steven Landsburg is a utilitarian economist.
Dupe me once, shame on you. Dupe me twice, shame on me. Dupe me everyday, this must be slashdot.
The real problem with mispelling on slashdot is this: if you make a reasonably insightful post, but you have grammar errors, guess what people respond to. The ideas you post are completely ignored and the spelling is blasted. It makes it easy to get off a quick easy response without even thinking, and isn't that what everyone wants to do?
Not that I've ever done that....
Haha, that'll teach them. Slashdotted the company website. Nice.
Parent post is right on. With a little bit of thinking you can see that we cannot use our own brains to understand themselves. To fully comprehend something you must be greater than it, a little philosophy will teach you this. That isn't to say we aren't greater than anything we haven't understood yet, but that an internal system cannot understand itself from without. And you must be without to understand the true strength size and capacity of a system. You can't see the strength of the walls of a castle without leaving it. You can't understand the brilliance of the brain without leaving it and leaving it isn't possible.
Does this sig work?
News of his employment here
It is legal to reverse engineer for compatibility if you don't have inside information. It is not ok if you do. It is sad, but a good move for Apple.
RIP DRM Free iTunes, Viva allofmp3 .
The eminent domain ruling IS A BIG CHANGE. Before state/city/county/federal government could take your land IF IT WAS FOR A PUBLIC USE. Like a school or park or something that the government was developing.
What makes this decision insane is that now the state/city/county/federal government can take your land FOR ANY REASON. If they want to take your land (of course they 'reimburse' you for it) and sell/give it to a private company for development it os ok.
That is DIFFERENT AND BAD. If they want a bar/casino/whatever where your house is YOU WILL BE FORCED TO LEAVE. It is important to note who populates local government. Local community leaders. Think a Chaney/Haliburton relationship. If I own a local chain, I'm on local government and I want you to move; if I can convince my local buddies it is ok, you are gone.
In short it offers terrific opportunities for corruption.
If you want the ruling reversed (since the mostly liberal judges voted for it, mostly conservative judges against) all you'd have to do is get some right-wing nut-job local government, in Texas for example, to bulldoze all the Planned Parenthoods, and sell the land to gun dealers or churches. That might change the liberal judges minds a bit.
Interesting idea. Credits for bandwidth. The problem I see, is this. What will they allow you do with a credit?
If you can get new songs with it, I can easily see someone with a big pipe seeding the popular songs to get the ones they really want. If you offer anything other than new songs, no one will seed. 'Access to exclusive videos' or cereal box gimmicks, won't get my bandwidth. And what is to stop someone from creating a garbage file named some popular song, give it the right md5 (or whatever) hash, and seed it?
I am sure they will retreat to the Napster idea of having centralized listing for the songs, so bandwidth & hosting costs will not be zero, they will be less. Napster had hundreds of servers before they went down. I say they will do this because this is the only way to control who gets what. You have to come to the central servers and for a cost (better be less than $.99 if they are getting rid of most bandwidth costs) your program gets a list of IP's hosting the song, and connects to them.
What'd really be smart is to use something akin to bittorrent for this. Let many people seed the song so rather than getting 'the fastest' connection, you (roughly) get the sum of the fastest connections. You wouldn't have 'poisoning' problems Kazaa does. You also could automatically pick up on a file if your connection drops out, or the other guys does (the bane of napster). If you controlled the trackers and just slighly modified bittorent so you never see the torrent file, (so you cannot redistribute access to the song) it'd be much better. Today's technology versus 5 years ago.
This is a good idea. Will it catch on with the public? Depends on how shiny the interface is, and how quickly they offer iPod friendly music. Will it catch on with smart people? DRM? Ahem, no thanks. I've got allofmp3.com.
What are we buying? Not the music/software/movie or else we could use it however we wanted. We buy a right to use the music/movie/software in a way prescribed by the copyright owner. If the prescribed mode of use is nuts (like iPods can only be used on windows/macs, one computer at a time and to switch computers you lose all your music), tough cookie.
This is the key. So many believe copyright exists to protect the company, its investment et cetera. NO WAY. Read the constitution, read anything pre-1990's.
Repeat after me, COPYRIGHTS EXIST TO BENEFIT PEOPLE NOT FIRMS. For pharmaceuticals they invest millions of dollars to innovate and get a product that improves the quality of life for people.
Should literature/music/movies/software (as a whole; none of these idiot Amazon double-click patents) be copyrighted? Of course, they take investment and improve the quality of life for people.
Have we gone overboard on the copyright? You bet. A CD has a much smaller benefit when A) it will be outmoded by the next digital format anyday now and you'll have to re-buy it. B) You can't use it how you want now that fair use has done down the toilet (i.e. rip it to your computer, make a backup copy, mix it with something else).
You know what? The studios want $20 per CD, I'd be willing to pay $20 if I was offered: a replacement when it broke or got too scratched up; a trade-in for a newer format when the format I purchased it in has become old; and I got to use it wherever I wanted.
Otherwise, I'll use allofmp3.com where if I lose the music or my cd gets too scratched up, I can afford to replace it. Fair use has suffered attrition beyond recognition or potency. Since we know we can't use it as we like (thus it is less valuable), it had better be cheap.
The key to solving this here is price separation. Which is something Americans/Europeans hate. Lets pretend the MPAA is able to do this (region encoding doesn't work). If the MPAA knows it costs $1 to make a DVD, but $100 million to make a movie, will they sell DVD's at $1.50? No, the volume isn't high enough for a low margin like that. But once they cover that $100 million, would they like to? Sure, if that person won't pay any more for it.
So they sell DVD's to Americans/Europeans for $20 and they sell DVD's to Singapore for $1.50. But wait, some of the Signapore DVD's are coming to America and the MPAA is undercutting itself and no longer able to cover the $100 million. So they can't sell them to Singapore cheap anymore. Singaporians can't afford $20 for a DVD so they pirate it.
This is the current situation. The way to get proper price separation is to get a rental model, or a pay per view model if you will. But people want to own their own movies, so they won't swallow that even if it is cheaper.
You can get around it by setting a bidding price. Have groups of individuals buy the movie for everyone. I make a great movie for $80 million. I release a trailer/teaser or better yet show it to some interested parties. I say "I will give this to you for $100 million." If people come up with the $100 million then it is released to everyone. If they don't, I may have to lower my price. (There is a freeriding problem here but this could be a great boon to the independent studios).
There are other ways to do this, but technology isn't the answer. It has never worked to fully price separate, because Americans/Europeans don't want to pay $20 if they can get it for $1.50 from Singapore. So someone will invent a way to get Singapore DVD's to America for less than $18.50 and Americans are happier and studios are livid.
Legislation is not the answer. Propoganda is not the answer. The answer is a new business model, but changing a beast like the MPAA/RIAA will take a lot more than anyone can put up (except our bought out government).
On the other hand, Gates says he has used firefox (and liked IE better). The guy who started the 'get the facts' flamewar (I forget his name) said in an interview right here on /. he has boxes running debian. Even Ballmer claims to have used linux. Et cetera et cetera.
I would guess most of the Linux user community has/does use windows. I don't know if that is true of the developer community (as these comments suggest it is not). Get with your end-users guys, please.
He says linux is getting just like microsoft. Ok I can see, graphically, some similarities. But what does he cite for evidence? Quick development cycles! Since when did M$ have quick development cycles!?! Lets see, XP - 2001, Longhorn - 2004, no 2005, wait how about 2006, yeah 2006 we promise. (We are just taking out the major reasons to switch, avalon, winFS, etc).
Linux in general does have fast development cycles admittedly, but not always. How long was it from Woody to Sarge (officially)?
The guy is clearly drumming up support for himself and OpenBSD. Stupidly enough he is attacking his potential user base! Free/Open/NetBSD is not end-user friendly. BSD users come from Linux, not Windows.
If I wanted to promote OpenBSD, I'd know Linux users are pretty smart. I'd Explain in non histerical and non insulting terms why it is great. Make some comparisons. Not attack those I wish to woo.
Gosh sounds like the RIAA suing its own fanbase.
I'll be honest I am a little surprised with all the technical analysis (in the community not just here) of why one OS is better and why it is more useful. The audience this article (wrong as it is) is referring to is average end user who doesn't care (or understand) widgets, dependencies, chipsets etc, therefore not liable to be swayed by them.
Of course OSX will not run on your standard PC. Apple's status as a hardware/software provider has protected it from hardware undercutting from China that has hurt so many hardware companies as well as software undercutting in the form of piracy that has plagued software only companies. They'd really be stupid to abandon a safe position like that.
First the suggestion that Linux will be killed by OSX is ridiculous. There will always be a demand for free as in freedom OS from the niche group that Linux currently dominates. That won't change. Linux development will go one, the OS will mature, and people will use it. No one has resisted switching to OSX because it is on PPC (maybe because it won't run a favorite program but not because the chip architecture is different).
Second why did Apple switch? Will this enable more apps to run on OSX then did before? Probably not much. It may upset small companies who actually did write software for PPC but they will port the software over and stop complaining. In the end it was a pure bottom line decision, Macs are expensive and Jobs wants them cheaper.
Apple has some great buzz among the public now. Thanks to the Mini, iPod and Shuffle. Among developers it seems they respond with "meh" to the oncoming Apple onslaught. Should this goodwill with the general public continue to grow Apple may convert more people, but not in waves, and not because of a different chipset. An end user will still see a Mac as the same, just a bit cheaper than before. OSX will still only be on Mac machines, they will still look the same etc.
Who should be worried? No one. Life as usual. Windows users will still use Windows, Linux users will still use Linux, Mac users will still use Macs. Unless Apple can find someway to seemlessly run native Windows apps in OSX (if so the WINE folks would probably like to talk to these Mac wizards) Microsoft shouldn't worry.
Unless OSX gets a lot more geeky a la Linux (example, standard KDE icons, Emacs, Konsole) and open sourced (which hasn't seemed to draw much interest in Solaris) those who use Linux won't go elsewhere. To boot many went to Linux for the cost of software, practically nothing. OSX will not be free.
Who will switch to Apple? Who is Jobs shooting at? Only those who wanted Macs in the past but were unable to justify the cost. With Windows being a major cost in a generic PC today, Apple is poised to be comparable in price.
On the other hand OpenOffice 2.0 will (the beta already does) support making any file (ppt, doc, etc) into a multipage pdf or a swf file (slides advance with each click.
When you actually think about it, those who develop the linux kernel are about as sophisticated (computer wise) as you can get. The OSS community has reverse engineered dozens of proprietary formats, locked down much better than that of bitkeeper, for compatibility. BK had to know that:
1. OSS community doesn't like proprietary formats/software.
2. The OSS community is very good at reverse engineering formats.
And ultimately yes, the BK format would be reverse engineered for more freedom. It is like giving a beer to Homer Simpson and expecting him not to drink it.
That is all.