Duh! I can't believe I never thought of that. That's simple enough. Great idea, thanks! Even better, it's OS-wide, so it effects all traffic coming into the PC. Sweet!
I'm talking about how Firefox still has leaks today (current version, right now). The damn thing has been out for years, and it's about as leaky as a screen door on a submarine. The OSS model is supposed to help make sure things like this don't happen, or if they do, they're less severe. It's been years, and Firefox still leaks memory and crashes like it's still in development (I've had two crashes in the past 3 hours, already). It's as bad or worse than many closed-source projects. In this particular case, OSS hasn't really proven itself to be more effective than closed source.
Like the other guy says... sheeple are always talking about what kind of crap they watched recently. Also, even supposedly decent online magazines, like Slate, are just filled with TV reviews. I know it's there. I even know what's on. I just choose not to watch it.
You should consider turning off your TV. I did years ago, and I haven't seen a single TV ad ever since! It's better than adblock! Not only does it "block" the ads, but it also "blocks" all of the shit that passes for TV programming these days!
I can't imagine why anyone would tolerate such things.
Memory leaks are infuriating, and completely unacceptable. It's just plain bad programming (so much for the "millions of pairs of eyes" thing, huh?). The only reason I still use Firefox is because of adblock. If there were a similar function/feature in IE, I'd be back to using IE.
What an astute essay! Of course, it's about 20 years late, but hey, better late than never, huh?
Apple has been actively engaging in hardware/software lock-in for 20+ years. Nothing has changed other than this one particular person has started to remove his head from his ass. Yippee.
You're not really understanding the situation. AT&T didn't say, "Hey, let's spy on our customers, and ask Bush if we can do it." That's not how his happened.
What actually happened was King George II told AT&T and other companies: Let us into your networks. We say so. We have the guns. If you don't comply, then you'll be branded as terrorists.
And yes, you can say that AT&T and such should not have complied, but nobody outside of the top brass at AT&T know what they were threatened with. Maybe they were given payment, maybe they weren't. Of course, the government won't release any of that information, so nobody will ever know.
Ha ha. I got a good chuckle over this. Government employees tend to be government employees because nobody will hire them in the private sector. The best and brightest certainly don't work for any branch of the US gov't. Hell, this is the same government that couldn't even help hundreds of thousands of people in our own country after Katrina. Good luck NSA. You're gonna need it!
I don't know what they're thinking. They're going to sell the same number of ads, minus all of the people (like me) who don't accept Flash ads. Truly a bone-headed move by Google.
It doesn't take any foresight or vision to say that "almost nobody is using Open Office right now". Foresight would be if I said "it's unlikely that many people will ever use Open Office".
Secondly, Open Office is nowhere close to "critical mass", and they're certainly nowhere near de-facto. In order for either of those things to be true, lots of people have to be using said software. Open Office usage, in my experience, is virtually non-existent.
If he was the business owner, and he didn't have any franchise agreements that prevented him from doing so, he would be able to refuse to sell to anybody he'd like, so long as it wasn't discrimination. In fact, an advanced retailing technique is to be selective with customers, which usually in turn, drives up demand (think "Soup Nazi"). It's not always bad business to turn away customers, depending on the situation. In many cases, the best thing a business owner can do is to turn away certain customers. It's pretty common among good business owners, in fact.
It might just work... I'm a rabid Pearl Jam fan, largely because they allow their amateur-taped concert recordings to be given away between fans. I've heard a LOT of good Pearl Jam shows, and in turn, I have bought many CD's because I've heard so many, mostly shitty, recordings of their shows, and I want to have some really good, clear recordings of their shows.
Regardless, music distribution companies simply add no value any more. When a company doesn't add any kind of value, they die. It happened with buggy whips, vacuum-tube manufacturers, and countless other industries. Right now, we can also see the slow death of Realtors because most, if not all, real estate information can be found easily for free. That's life. Adapt or die.
OK, now, I understand what the big music industry people are trying to accomplish. They're trying to keep from going the way of the buggy-whip makers. They're pulling out all the stops to keep from becoming irrelevant. That's understandable. But jeez, this is just pathetic.
They're trying anything and everything to keep people from buying their music. They're putting up every kind of conceivable roadblock that they can come up with, as malicious and as pointless as they may be. These guys are really getting desperate, and it shows. Pretty soon, even the average brain-dead consumer will understand what they're trying to do, and then it really will be all over for the entire industry.
does XP "not work" because it cant play h.264 out of the box?
Well, that depends on what you expect from a consumer desktop OS. If you have an expectation that an OS is supposed to play "h.264", then no, it doesn't work. I've never heard of "h.264" before, and I can't imagine that most other people have, either. I'm speaking for normal people. If you want to pick random requirements, then we can easily argue that no OS being sold today is complete. I don't think it's any kind of stretch to say that most people know what MP3's are, have MP3's, and expect their PC to be able to play MP3's with no additional work on the user's part.
You can talk about whatever you want. Vista's hardware support is pretty rotten at this point, which is why sales are relatively low. XP is still the gold standard for consumer desktop OS's. In 2007, I can buy a copy of Windows XP, or a computer with Windows XP, and it works. Why anybody would want to subject themselves to extra headache when acceptable alternatives are available is beyond me. I dealt with hardware issues in Windows in the 90's because there were no other good alternatives. Today, you can either use Windows XP, and start *using* your computer right out of the box, you can buy an Apple and deal with relatively extreme vendor lock-in, or you can buy a Linux or Vista box and deal with hardware headaches, a la 1996.
How could this ever be solved for free software until the patents run out?
That's a good question. I have no idea. Regardless of what the solution is, it's still not the consumer's problem. The consumer is buying the end product, just like anything else.
If Bic can't sell you ball point pens with ink because they're having trouble with their ink suppliers, who's going to buy Bic pens, with the idea that "It's not their fault they can't get ink. I'll just buy some empty, non-functioning ball point pens, and work around the "no ink" problem myself."? Any sane consumer will assume that the Bic product is faulty (which it is), and buy a competitor's product that does function properly.
During the pet food recalls, nobody continued to buy potentially tainted food because the manufacturer made a good faith effort to provide a good product. The reason the products were defective is irrelevant. The products were defective, and no consumer in his/her right mind is going to buy a defective product unless there is absolutely no alternative.
In 2007, an OS that doesn't play MP3 files out of the box is going to be considered by most end users as defective.
Whilst reviews are great, it would have been nice if he could've asked a simple question about this on the ubuntu forum - I guess Windows users aren't used to the option of doing that.
You're right. If I have to go to a forum to get basic functionality of a brand new product working right out of the box, that product gets returned. Having to get "support" for a new product means that that product is broken.
#3. Playing mp3's - learn the legal issues, we've been harping on that for YEARS.
You're missing the point. Average users shouldn't have to go to law school to figure out why their software doesn't work. Legal issues concerning codecs are irrelevant to users. Either the product works, or it doesn't. In this aspect, the product does not work.
That would be worth it to our glorious Federal Government. After all, a person hurting themselves by doing meth is a violent criminal that should be locked up for a long time. A "terrorist", if you will.
All hail our all-knowing, and all-powerful government! Now, I hope they discover a way to watch all of us, all of the time, in order to protect us from ourselves and each other and Iraqis and the Devil and Communists!
Why? Because it was so cheap to do, why wouldn't they cover all of their bases? It certainly doesn't hurt to have the backing of the ISO. MS supposedly spent $50K on that. Hell, that's ridiculously cheap. Just for the potentially good PR, I'm sure they wouldn't have paid more than ten times that.
Wrong. This has nothing to do with buying votes from the ISO. This has everything to do with standards bodies being ignored because they're irrelevant. Remember the W3C? Yeah, they still exist, but who in their right mind pays attention to them? Why would anybody? They pick arbitrary standards that they think are good ideas, but if nobody actually uses those standards, what's the point? That's what a de-facto standard is. It's a standard that comes about through everyday use, not some arbitrary organization of people making arbitrary decisions.
In this case, most of the working world will use MS's OOXML standard, regardless of what any organization says is the "right" standard. MS is going to continue to be able to dictate the "office document" data standard because it's what people use. If they had some competition that made a decent product that people actually used, then there'd be more relevancy of a 3rd party designing a "standard". As is, Office is what most people use. Such is life.
I don't know what "shard" means in this context. I'm going to assume it's a dorky way to say "server", but you're missing the point. The author is saying, "NASDAQ can do it. Why can't MMOs?", not the other way around. MMO's are really nothing new technology-wise. The difference is that no MMO comes even close to be as well built, technically, as say, the NASDAQ and NYSE. Those systems are incredibly high volume, and relatively stable. (Hint: They're not using MySQL).
MMO's could certainly make certainly large worlds. The systems themselves are not all that high volume (hence the comparison to stock markets). It's just that none of them are built well enough to handle it.
I don't think most people WANT to rape people rather than fucking them with their consent. However, I do think everyone has a threshold at which they'll rape rather than deal with the pain of dating someone legitimately. For most, that pain is provided by unreasonable prices. For others, it's societal norms that force you to jump through hoops to be able to fuck somebody you legitimately paid for (via dating). So they don't have to make it as easy as the free alternatives, because that's impossible. They only need to make it easy enough that most people will decide that their process is better than breaking the law.
Women need to make fucking as cheap and easy as possible, and they will be happy. The more painful it is, the more people will turn to free alternatives out of frustration. Most people that are not generally criminals will only break laws if complying with them becomes too onerous.
Right now, women seem to be trying to crack down on rapists and make the legitimate versions ever more restrictive. This is counterproductive, and will only push more people away.
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Duh! I can't believe I never thought of that. That's simple enough. Great idea, thanks! Even better, it's OS-wide, so it effects all traffic coming into the PC. Sweet!
Oh well, buh-bye Firefox!
I'm talking about how Firefox still has leaks today (current version, right now). The damn thing has been out for years, and it's about as leaky as a screen door on a submarine. The OSS model is supposed to help make sure things like this don't happen, or if they do, they're less severe. It's been years, and Firefox still leaks memory and crashes like it's still in development (I've had two crashes in the past 3 hours, already). It's as bad or worse than many closed-source projects. In this particular case, OSS hasn't really proven itself to be more effective than closed source.
Like the other guy says... sheeple are always talking about what kind of crap they watched recently. Also, even supposedly decent online magazines, like Slate, are just filled with TV reviews. I know it's there. I even know what's on. I just choose not to watch it.
You should consider turning off your TV. I did years ago, and I haven't seen a single TV ad ever since! It's better than adblock! Not only does it "block" the ads, but it also "blocks" all of the shit that passes for TV programming these days!
I can't imagine why anyone would tolerate such things.
Memory leaks are infuriating, and completely unacceptable. It's just plain bad programming (so much for the "millions of pairs of eyes" thing, huh?). The only reason I still use Firefox is because of adblock. If there were a similar function/feature in IE, I'd be back to using IE.
What an astute essay! Of course, it's about 20 years late, but hey, better late than never, huh?
Apple has been actively engaging in hardware/software lock-in for 20+ years. Nothing has changed other than this one particular person has started to remove his head from his ass. Yippee.
You're not really understanding the situation. AT&T didn't say, "Hey, let's spy on our customers, and ask Bush if we can do it." That's not how his happened.
What actually happened was King George II told AT&T and other companies: Let us into your networks. We say so. We have the guns. If you don't comply, then you'll be branded as terrorists.
And yes, you can say that AT&T and such should not have complied, but nobody outside of the top brass at AT&T know what they were threatened with. Maybe they were given payment, maybe they weren't. Of course, the government won't release any of that information, so nobody will ever know.
Ha ha. I got a good chuckle over this. Government employees tend to be government employees because nobody will hire them in the private sector. The best and brightest certainly don't work for any branch of the US gov't. Hell, this is the same government that couldn't even help hundreds of thousands of people in our own country after Katrina. Good luck NSA. You're gonna need it!
I don't know what they're thinking. They're going to sell the same number of ads, minus all of the people (like me) who don't accept Flash ads. Truly a bone-headed move by Google.
It doesn't take any foresight or vision to say that "almost nobody is using Open Office right now". Foresight would be if I said "it's unlikely that many people will ever use Open Office".
First off, please learn how to capitalize.
Secondly, Open Office is nowhere close to "critical mass", and they're certainly nowhere near de-facto. In order for either of those things to be true, lots of people have to be using said software. Open Office usage, in my experience, is virtually non-existent.
If he was the business owner, and he didn't have any franchise agreements that prevented him from doing so, he would be able to refuse to sell to anybody he'd like, so long as it wasn't discrimination. In fact, an advanced retailing technique is to be selective with customers, which usually in turn, drives up demand (think "Soup Nazi"). It's not always bad business to turn away customers, depending on the situation. In many cases, the best thing a business owner can do is to turn away certain customers. It's pretty common among good business owners, in fact.
It might just work... I'm a rabid Pearl Jam fan, largely because they allow their amateur-taped concert recordings to be given away between fans. I've heard a LOT of good Pearl Jam shows, and in turn, I have bought many CD's because I've heard so many, mostly shitty, recordings of their shows, and I want to have some really good, clear recordings of their shows.
Regardless, music distribution companies simply add no value any more. When a company doesn't add any kind of value, they die. It happened with buggy whips, vacuum-tube manufacturers, and countless other industries. Right now, we can also see the slow death of Realtors because most, if not all, real estate information can be found easily for free. That's life. Adapt or die.
OK, now, I understand what the big music industry people are trying to accomplish. They're trying to keep from going the way of the buggy-whip makers. They're pulling out all the stops to keep from becoming irrelevant. That's understandable. But jeez, this is just pathetic.
They're trying anything and everything to keep people from buying their music. They're putting up every kind of conceivable roadblock that they can come up with, as malicious and as pointless as they may be. These guys are really getting desperate, and it shows. Pretty soon, even the average brain-dead consumer will understand what they're trying to do, and then it really will be all over for the entire industry.
does XP "not work" because it cant play h.264 out of the box?
Well, that depends on what you expect from a consumer desktop OS. If you have an expectation that an OS is supposed to play "h.264", then no, it doesn't work. I've never heard of "h.264" before, and I can't imagine that most other people have, either. I'm speaking for normal people. If you want to pick random requirements, then we can easily argue that no OS being sold today is complete. I don't think it's any kind of stretch to say that most people know what MP3's are, have MP3's, and expect their PC to be able to play MP3's with no additional work on the user's part.
We should be talking about Vista not XP.
You can talk about whatever you want. Vista's hardware support is pretty rotten at this point, which is why sales are relatively low. XP is still the gold standard for consumer desktop OS's. In 2007, I can buy a copy of Windows XP, or a computer with Windows XP, and it works. Why anybody would want to subject themselves to extra headache when acceptable alternatives are available is beyond me. I dealt with hardware issues in Windows in the 90's because there were no other good alternatives. Today, you can either use Windows XP, and start *using* your computer right out of the box, you can buy an Apple and deal with relatively extreme vendor lock-in, or you can buy a Linux or Vista box and deal with hardware headaches, a la 1996.
How could this ever be solved for free software until the patents run out?
That's a good question. I have no idea. Regardless of what the solution is, it's still not the consumer's problem. The consumer is buying the end product, just like anything else.
If Bic can't sell you ball point pens with ink because they're having trouble with their ink suppliers, who's going to buy Bic pens, with the idea that "It's not their fault they can't get ink. I'll just buy some empty, non-functioning ball point pens, and work around the "no ink" problem myself."? Any sane consumer will assume that the Bic product is faulty (which it is), and buy a competitor's product that does function properly.
During the pet food recalls, nobody continued to buy potentially tainted food because the manufacturer made a good faith effort to provide a good product. The reason the products were defective is irrelevant. The products were defective, and no consumer in his/her right mind is going to buy a defective product unless there is absolutely no alternative.
In 2007, an OS that doesn't play MP3 files out of the box is going to be considered by most end users as defective.
Whilst reviews are great, it would have been nice if he could've asked a simple question about this on the ubuntu forum - I guess Windows users aren't used to the option of doing that.
You're right. If I have to go to a forum to get basic functionality of a brand new product working right out of the box, that product gets returned. Having to get "support" for a new product means that that product is broken.
#3. Playing mp3's - learn the legal issues, we've been harping on that for YEARS.
You're missing the point. Average users shouldn't have to go to law school to figure out why their software doesn't work. Legal issues concerning codecs are irrelevant to users. Either the product works, or it doesn't. In this aspect, the product does not work.
I'd say for hardware support Ubuntu is way ahead of where Win2k was in 2000 or 2001.
That's great, but it's 2007 now.
They could be on meth.
That would be worth it to our glorious Federal Government. After all, a person hurting themselves by doing meth is a violent criminal that should be locked up for a long time. A "terrorist", if you will.
All hail our all-knowing, and all-powerful government! Now, I hope they discover a way to watch all of us, all of the time, in order to protect us from ourselves and each other and Iraqis and the Devil and Communists!
Why? Because it was so cheap to do, why wouldn't they cover all of their bases? It certainly doesn't hurt to have the backing of the ISO. MS supposedly spent $50K on that. Hell, that's ridiculously cheap. Just for the potentially good PR, I'm sure they wouldn't have paid more than ten times that.
Wrong. This has nothing to do with buying votes from the ISO. This has everything to do with standards bodies being ignored because they're irrelevant. Remember the W3C? Yeah, they still exist, but who in their right mind pays attention to them? Why would anybody? They pick arbitrary standards that they think are good ideas, but if nobody actually uses those standards, what's the point? That's what a de-facto standard is. It's a standard that comes about through everyday use, not some arbitrary organization of people making arbitrary decisions.
In this case, most of the working world will use MS's OOXML standard, regardless of what any organization says is the "right" standard. MS is going to continue to be able to dictate the "office document" data standard because it's what people use. If they had some competition that made a decent product that people actually used, then there'd be more relevancy of a 3rd party designing a "standard". As is, Office is what most people use. Such is life.
I don't know what "shard" means in this context. I'm going to assume it's a dorky way to say "server", but you're missing the point. The author is saying, "NASDAQ can do it. Why can't MMOs?", not the other way around. MMO's are really nothing new technology-wise. The difference is that no MMO comes even close to be as well built, technically, as say, the NASDAQ and NYSE. Those systems are incredibly high volume, and relatively stable. (Hint: They're not using MySQL).
MMO's could certainly make certainly large worlds. The systems themselves are not all that high volume (hence the comparison to stock markets). It's just that none of them are built well enough to handle it.
I don't think most people WANT to rape people rather than fucking them with their consent. However, I do think everyone has a threshold at which they'll rape rather than deal with the pain of dating someone legitimately. For most, that pain is provided by unreasonable prices. For others, it's societal norms that force you to jump through hoops to be able to fuck somebody you legitimately paid for (via dating). So they don't have to make it as easy as the free alternatives, because that's impossible. They only need to make it easy enough that most people will decide that their process is better than breaking the law.
Women need to make fucking as cheap and easy as possible, and they will be happy. The more painful it is, the more people will turn to free alternatives out of frustration. Most people that are not generally criminals will only break laws if complying with them becomes too onerous.
Right now, women seem to be trying to crack down on rapists and make the legitimate versions ever more restrictive. This is counterproductive, and will only push more people away.
Oh well. Rape it is, then!