The best example of this is when I drive down I-57 from Chi-cagg-o to Central Illinois, all the signs along the cornfields advocating gun rights. Like the following:
Crooks are many Cops are few Crooks have guns Why shouldn't you?
So as I drive by I always write my own. Like the following:
I'm armed with a shotgun When I plow my fields I'll blow you to bits If you fuck with my crop yields
Well that wasn't very good, really, but you get the point... keeps me awake on the road.
I think the claim is not of the "your compiler is specifically optimized for Intel, that's no fair!" variety. It's more of the "your compiler writers went out of their way to generate code that would run slowly on AMD" variety. I bet that's pretty hard to prove, even if it is true... but it's a serious allegation.
It's kind of like the "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" allegation, whether that's true or not.
From what I read on the IMC website it sounded like they don't log IPs anyway. How would they give those IPs to the cops?
Perhaps if people are frequently posting about committing illegal acts on their message boards the police could request that they keep a record matching posts to IPs and cooperate with police when they ask for those IPs, but if they don't keep logs already I don't know what the police could hope to accomplish in this particular case by seizing the server.
Well, actually I think the people working on this stopped working on it and are working on something else now. But it's called a "capability system" and it's an alternate idea for how to do an operating system that has been around for a long time but never become popular.
Their position is no less consistent than that of Windows users that believe the EULA is illegal or invalid. Those users may believe the EULA is illegal/invalid, but they for whatever reason need to use Windows so they agree to it anyway. SCO may believe that the GPL is wrong, but where are they going to get a good web browser without doing a lot of work or spending a lot of money without using GPL software?
get-process might be more intuitive than ps (well maybe it should be get-processes or something... I don't know, I saw someone use ps once and instantly understood), but once you alias it to your own favorite quick thing to type, you'll still have to type get-process on other computers that you happen to use. ps is a nice short command that works on all *nix boxes, not just a few that you happen to manage.
Although the site linked to above was a joke, I read somewhere that (for serious) George Bush has "My Sharona" on his iPod.
Supposedly some religious right folks weren't too happy about hearing that, because the song contains some kind of sexual references. If I were the religious right I'd be more worried that my bestest friend in government is losing brain cells listening to that stupid shit.
The point wasn't that people won't install other messengers because they're less featureful. The point is that they use the OS monopoly to hook people on their messenger and then the messenger to lock people into the OS.
I mean, I've seen people install aftermarket products with features lacking from factory versions. Like bumpers for their cars that lack the feature of absorbing bumps. I accidentally bumped a guy like that; my car wasn't scratched and he needed his whole bumper replaced.
My messenger complaint is that it's basically an MSN ad stuck in a Windows install. Kind of like how Windows installs used to ask you to sign up for Passport (do they still?). But then again, a friend of mine recently bought an iBook and I watched OS X's setup, and the whole thing was like, "Don't you want to register for mac.com e-mail and webspace? How about some nice e-mails from Apple when we have product updates? Would you like to buy a Steve Jobs autographed nipple ring (all the cool kids are doing it!)?".
(And when I installed Gentoo, it's like the whole thing was a monopolistic attempt to lock me into portage. Seriously, where can I turn to get away from lock-in!?!?!)
"Granted, most of this comes from my knowing how to use a command-line FTP client, but it's easy enough to figure out."
It also comes from your knowledge of *exactly* where to cd to to download firefox. That's pretty unreasonable to expect of even knowledgeable users.
Back when the Microsoft antitrust suit was going on and I was using a Mac Quadra and AOL 3.0 I thought, "shouldn't it be the job of the ISPs to distribute Internet client software such as browsers?" But now I look at the CD that the SBC/Yahoo people send me and I wouldn't put it in my computer with a ten-foot pole. Crappy branded IE? Shortcuts to Yahoo mail on the desktop? I think not! And if my OS isn't the dominant OS (it's not), a lot of good that CD will do me.
So maybe the responsibility of providing such a vital piece of Internet client software falls upon distributors. But Microsoft is a distributor! It would certainly be possible to run the Windows kernel today with almost none of the userland utilities, including desktop/shell and file managers, because they can be replaced by alternative programs. Microsoft distributes these with the OS, and it's a good thing they do because it makes building your own Windows-based system much more viable. Is that why Microsoft does it? Only to the extent that it makes you dependant upon Microsoft rather than to a hardware vendor, but it still works.
Certainly, the free unixes have a nice solution with package management. I don't have to have any packages I don't want on my Gentoo box (except that I had to install all the KDE libs to get Rosegarden... grr...), and it's not hard to get it that way. It's a nice solution for people with fast internet connections, that is.
In conclusion, I really think that Microsoft stops at a pretty reasonable place as far as what software to include with Windows these days. Even if that's only because it's the software that they don't think they could charge for.
Even on Windows programs often install straight onto c:\ by default (the nerve!), and sometimes within Program Files they're within subfolders related to the vendor, which can sometimes be non-obvious.
It sounds like you would have spent much less time just adding an entry to your WM's app menu, or possibly a symlink in your home directory, after figuring it out the first time. Tooling around the Program Files directory is not an intuitive way to find anything.
It (the middle-click autoscroll) does suck in MS Office and in IE and in most Microsoft products I've tried (they all must use the same crappy library).
It also used to be a Moz/FF extension, but has been added in to the main code. They actually got it right, however, and there are nice medium speeds (one thing they didn't get right was that in the *nix versions middle-clicking is also supposed to open a location from the X selection, so if you start autoscrolling and don't stop by clicking in the little circle it tries to open that location, which is usually just some random string that I previously selected in an xterm; in about:config you can filter for middlemouse I think to find an option to change middle-click behaviour).
Opera has excellent autoscroll (uber-smooth), or at least did the last time I tried it.
Certainly that's the case for a modern desktop operating system.
To be honest, I'm still waiting for a feature from BeOS to hit the "modern desktop operating system" scene: volume bars in the mixer for each different program that's using sound. So if I want to listen to music and play a game with obnoxious sound that can't be disabled (this happens with Java and Flash games mostly), I don't have to listen to the obnoxious sound.
I could probably create a user account, not put it in the "sound" group, and run all such games under that user, and it wouldn't have permission to access the sound device...
How can this be modded insightful? Just about all software has bugs and much software can be exploited somehow. Can the upgrade cycle be harsh and expensive? Sure, but it was somebody's choice to install particular software for their security-critical application. If it doesn't meet their needs, maybe they should switch (another harsh and expensive process).
But it's such detachment. I'm going to look at your calendar and set you up an appointment with me. I'm going to log in to the server and look up your information. I don't care how productive it is to set up meetings like that, it's not human.
Me, all I use is my brains. If I miss meeting you, it probably wasn't important to me anyway. Well, that's a pretty big exaggeration. But seriously. Humanity above productivity.
That's kinda interesting... several years ago my brother and I started rebuilding computers from old parts people gave away. We had several winmodems. Could almost never get them to work in Windows, since we didn't have the original driver disk, and the drivers were difficult to locate online. At one point we tried to contact some kind of support line for one of the companies and they said that they had a driver for the modem, but couldn't send us them because it was against company policy (better not let those winmodem drivers fall into the hands of non-winmodem owners!) . I think we just ended up finding regular modems. So, certainly, the horrors of winmodems are not just for Linux users. I wonder if any of those winmodems are supported by open source Linux drivers. However, having trashed all of them and dial-up Internet service years ago, I have no way to find out.
What's worse about the tab completion in Windows is this: let's say I'm editing some files in vim, so I've got one open that I just saved called something like happy.txt. If I want to copy it to another location, I hit [windowskey]-R, cmd.exe and then copy hap-[tab] and the first match it brings up is.happy.txt.swp. Seriously, I didn't type a damn period, how does Windows think I want that!?!?
What also sucks is that after you tab-complete a directory name it doesn't automagically put a '\' character after the name, you have to type it yourself. And the whole thing with parts of your path appearing in quotes when you're tab-completing, which just looks a lot uglier to me than just escaping out spaces and whatnot (though escaping spaces would have to use some character other than '\'... well, actually, vim's auto-completion (on Windows) uses '\' both as a directory delimiter and escape character, which looks *really* ugly.).
Ai, it's enough to drive me to perform simple file manipulation with a gui.
And what could Microsoft do to prove this? Force them to hand over all their source code? Or the communications between Samba developers? At least the SCO suit could force something out of IBM et al.
Obviously there was no copyright law in the time of Bach and Mozart, and in fact the entire tradition of musical composition was very different then. Bach and his contemporaries frequently borrowed ideas from their own earlier works and from the works of others, sometimes completely copying sections of pieces. If I remember correctly (it's been a few hundred years) most of Bach's music was never "published" until the time of Schumann and the Bach Society a few hundred years later.
I think I had a point when I started this post, but I don't anymore. Bye!
I've seen it fail to block flash a few times. One site on which flash gets through is cbs.sportsline.com, at least on my computer. I haven't really looked hard at why, but it has flash ads and content that get right through.
Your parent didn't say "end to lock in". Rather, "end to end lock in". Perhaps there should have been hyphens there: "end-to-end lock-in". That is, they don't want to end the lock-in, they want to extend its scope beyond the age-old problem of, "We must buy an office suite for new computers and have many old *.doc files lying around, better buy MS Office" and to a new scope of "We have an entire office infrastructure built around the use of MS Office that controls how documents are created, stored, read and distributed. Your ass better be using MS Office if you want to communicate with your co-workers!"
One might argue that despite any threat of lock-in, office work flows have to be standardized around something and it might as well be a nifty solution like highly-integrated MS Office server systems that promise efficeincy improvements. Others might argue that being locked in is a fate worse than death, and that the solutions provided by these complicated systems are overkill, intrusive, and bound to be unreliable. And lots of other things.
I've never used MS Office in that kind of end-to-end way before, so I'm not exactly qualified to argue either way.
I use VS.net. Its editor is uber-sweet. Every time I want to, say, edit my modules.conf file I upload it to a remote FTP-able location, reboot into Windows, edit the file, save it again, reboot into Linux, and replace the file.
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The best example of this is when I drive down I-57 from Chi-cagg-o to Central Illinois, all the signs along the cornfields advocating gun rights. Like the following:
Crooks are many
Cops are few
Crooks have guns
Why shouldn't you?
So as I drive by I always write my own. Like the following:
I'm armed with a shotgun
When I plow my fields
I'll blow you to bits
If you fuck with my crop yields
Well that wasn't very good, really, but you get the point... keeps me awake on the road.
I think the claim is not of the "your compiler is specifically optimized for Intel, that's no fair!" variety. It's more of the "your compiler writers went out of their way to generate code that would run slowly on AMD" variety. I bet that's pretty hard to prove, even if it is true... but it's a serious allegation.
It's kind of like the "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" allegation, whether that's true or not.
From what I read on the IMC website it sounded like they don't log IPs anyway. How would they give those IPs to the cops?
Perhaps if people are frequently posting about committing illegal acts on their message boards the police could request that they keep a record matching posts to IPs and cooperate with police when they ask for those IPs, but if they don't keep logs already I don't know what the police could hope to accomplish in this particular case by seizing the server.
Sounds like you want this: http://www.eros-os.org/
Well, actually I think the people working on this stopped working on it and are working on something else now. But it's called a "capability system" and it's an alternate idea for how to do an operating system that has been around for a long time but never become popular.
Their position is no less consistent than that of Windows users that believe the EULA is illegal or invalid. Those users may believe the EULA is illegal/invalid, but they for whatever reason need to use Windows so they agree to it anyway. SCO may believe that the GPL is wrong, but where are they going to get a good web browser without doing a lot of work or spending a lot of money without using GPL software?
get-process might be more intuitive than ps (well maybe it should be get-processes or something... I don't know, I saw someone use ps once and instantly understood), but once you alias it to your own favorite quick thing to type, you'll still have to type get-process on other computers that you happen to use. ps is a nice short command that works on all *nix boxes, not just a few that you happen to manage.
Try everyone who bought those computers with the operating systems pre-installed. Which is most people.
Although the site linked to above was a joke, I read somewhere that (for serious) George Bush has "My Sharona" on his iPod.
Supposedly some religious right folks weren't too happy about hearing that, because the song contains some kind of sexual references. If I were the religious right I'd be more worried that my bestest friend in government is losing brain cells listening to that stupid shit.
The point wasn't that people won't install other messengers because they're less featureful. The point is that they use the OS monopoly to hook people on their messenger and then the messenger to lock people into the OS.
I mean, I've seen people install aftermarket products with features lacking from factory versions. Like bumpers for their cars that lack the feature of absorbing bumps. I accidentally bumped a guy like that; my car wasn't scratched and he needed his whole bumper replaced.
My messenger complaint is that it's basically an MSN ad stuck in a Windows install. Kind of like how Windows installs used to ask you to sign up for Passport (do they still?). But then again, a friend of mine recently bought an iBook and I watched OS X's setup, and the whole thing was like, "Don't you want to register for mac.com e-mail and webspace? How about some nice e-mails from Apple when we have product updates? Would you like to buy a Steve Jobs autographed nipple ring (all the cool kids are doing it!)?".
(And when I installed Gentoo, it's like the whole thing was a monopolistic attempt to lock me into portage. Seriously, where can I turn to get away from lock-in!?!?!)
"Granted, most of this comes from my knowing how to use a command-line FTP client, but it's easy enough to figure out."
It also comes from your knowledge of *exactly* where to cd to to download firefox. That's pretty unreasonable to expect of even knowledgeable users.
Back when the Microsoft antitrust suit was going on and I was using a Mac Quadra and AOL 3.0 I thought, "shouldn't it be the job of the ISPs to distribute Internet client software such as browsers?" But now I look at the CD that the SBC/Yahoo people send me and I wouldn't put it in my computer with a ten-foot pole. Crappy branded IE? Shortcuts to Yahoo mail on the desktop? I think not! And if my OS isn't the dominant OS (it's not), a lot of good that CD will do me.
So maybe the responsibility of providing such a vital piece of Internet client software falls upon distributors. But Microsoft is a distributor! It would certainly be possible to run the Windows kernel today with almost none of the userland utilities, including desktop/shell and file managers, because they can be replaced by alternative programs. Microsoft distributes these with the OS, and it's a good thing they do because it makes building your own Windows-based system much more viable. Is that why Microsoft does it? Only to the extent that it makes you dependant upon Microsoft rather than to a hardware vendor, but it still works.
Certainly, the free unixes have a nice solution with package management. I don't have to have any packages I don't want on my Gentoo box (except that I had to install all the KDE libs to get Rosegarden... grr...), and it's not hard to get it that way. It's a nice solution for people with fast internet connections, that is.
In conclusion, I really think that Microsoft stops at a pretty reasonable place as far as what software to include with Windows these days. Even if that's only because it's the software that they don't think they could charge for.
Even on Windows programs often install straight onto c:\ by default (the nerve!), and sometimes within Program Files they're within subfolders related to the vendor, which can sometimes be non-obvious.
It sounds like you would have spent much less time just adding an entry to your WM's app menu, or possibly a symlink in your home directory, after figuring it out the first time. Tooling around the Program Files directory is not an intuitive way to find anything.
It (the middle-click autoscroll) does suck in MS Office and in IE and in most Microsoft products I've tried (they all must use the same crappy library).
It also used to be a Moz/FF extension, but has been added in to the main code. They actually got it right, however, and there are nice medium speeds (one thing they didn't get right was that in the *nix versions middle-clicking is also supposed to open a location from the X selection, so if you start autoscrolling and don't stop by clicking in the little circle it tries to open that location, which is usually just some random string that I previously selected in an xterm; in about:config you can filter for middlemouse I think to find an option to change middle-click behaviour).
Opera has excellent autoscroll (uber-smooth), or at least did the last time I tried it.
If you are speaking of writing pages and pages of prose... then use the right tool for the right job.
Now if you're talking about code (or poetry, if that's your bag), where you don't go on for ages without a carriage return, vi is great.
I thought someone wrote vi for emacs. So it has a fine text editor.
Certainly that's the case for a modern desktop operating system.
To be honest, I'm still waiting for a feature from BeOS to hit the "modern desktop operating system" scene: volume bars in the mixer for each different program that's using sound. So if I want to listen to music and play a game with obnoxious sound that can't be disabled (this happens with Java and Flash games mostly), I don't have to listen to the obnoxious sound.
I could probably create a user account, not put it in the "sound" group, and run all such games under that user, and it wouldn't have permission to access the sound device...
How can this be modded insightful? Just about all software has bugs and much software can be exploited somehow. Can the upgrade cycle be harsh and expensive? Sure, but it was somebody's choice to install particular software for their security-critical application. If it doesn't meet their needs, maybe they should switch (another harsh and expensive process).
But it's such detachment. I'm going to look at your calendar and set you up an appointment with me. I'm going to log in to the server and look up your information. I don't care how productive it is to set up meetings like that, it's not human.
Me, all I use is my brains. If I miss meeting you, it probably wasn't important to me anyway. Well, that's a pretty big exaggeration. But seriously. Humanity above productivity.
That's kinda interesting... several years ago my brother and I started rebuilding computers from old parts people gave away. We had several winmodems. Could almost never get them to work in Windows, since we didn't have the original driver disk, and the drivers were difficult to locate online. At one point we tried to contact some kind of support line for one of the companies and they said that they had a driver for the modem, but couldn't send us them because it was against company policy (better not let those winmodem drivers fall into the hands of non-winmodem owners!) . I think we just ended up finding regular modems. So, certainly, the horrors of winmodems are not just for Linux users. I wonder if any of those winmodems are supported by open source Linux drivers. However, having trashed all of them and dial-up Internet service years ago, I have no way to find out.
What's worse about the tab completion in Windows is this: let's say I'm editing some files in vim, so I've got one open that I just saved called something like happy.txt. If I want to copy it to another location, I hit [windowskey]-R, cmd.exe and then copy hap-[tab] and the first match it brings up is .happy.txt.swp. Seriously, I didn't type a damn period, how does Windows think I want that!?!?
What also sucks is that after you tab-complete a directory name it doesn't automagically put a '\' character after the name, you have to type it yourself. And the whole thing with parts of your path appearing in quotes when you're tab-completing, which just looks a lot uglier to me than just escaping out spaces and whatnot (though escaping spaces would have to use some character other than '\'... well, actually, vim's auto-completion (on Windows) uses '\' both as a directory delimiter and escape character, which looks *really* ugly.).
Ai, it's enough to drive me to perform simple file manipulation with a gui.
And what could Microsoft do to prove this? Force them to hand over all their source code? Or the communications between Samba developers? At least the SCO suit could force something out of IBM et al.
Obviously there was no copyright law in the time of Bach and Mozart, and in fact the entire tradition of musical composition was very different then. Bach and his contemporaries frequently borrowed ideas from their own earlier works and from the works of others, sometimes completely copying sections of pieces. If I remember correctly (it's been a few hundred years) most of Bach's music was never "published" until the time of Schumann and the Bach Society a few hundred years later.
I think I had a point when I started this post, but I don't anymore. Bye!
I've seen it fail to block flash a few times. One site on which flash gets through is cbs.sportsline.com, at least on my computer. I haven't really looked hard at why, but it has flash ads and content that get right through.
Your parent didn't say "end to lock in". Rather, "end to end lock in". Perhaps there should have been hyphens there: "end-to-end lock-in". That is, they don't want to end the lock-in, they want to extend its scope beyond the age-old problem of, "We must buy an office suite for new computers and have many old *.doc files lying around, better buy MS Office" and to a new scope of "We have an entire office infrastructure built around the use of MS Office that controls how documents are created, stored, read and distributed. Your ass better be using MS Office if you want to communicate with your co-workers!"
One might argue that despite any threat of lock-in, office work flows have to be standardized around something and it might as well be a nifty solution like highly-integrated MS Office server systems that promise efficeincy improvements. Others might argue that being locked in is a fate worse than death, and that the solutions provided by these complicated systems are overkill, intrusive, and bound to be unreliable. And lots of other things.
I've never used MS Office in that kind of end-to-end way before, so I'm not exactly qualified to argue either way.
If you want to know about servers on the net go to netcraft or something. This particular FA is about something different. Read it.
I use VS.net. Its editor is uber-sweet. Every time I want to, say, edit my modules.conf file I upload it to a remote FTP-able location, reboot into Windows, edit the file, save it again, reboot into Linux, and replace the file.