I have no idea how you found that the sentence that you based your whole argument off of was in disagreement with it.
If auto makers were constantly pushing the ease of maintenance features on you, instead of the mechanic, I think you'd find that the norm would be quite different.
I mean, take a look at systems with goals like Mandrake. Terms like "Easy Linux", "Accessible Linux".... "Desktop Linux" are dropped so often that people have adopted it as if it's some panacea towards "saving" a OS which already has enough critical mass in the NOC to keep it's forward momentum. It's just stupid and reeks of a need to have something to strive for, regardless if it's pragmatic or not.
When you have 18 million users, many of them who actually think they'll get something for free and "all they need to do is give out their email address", spam is not a face-saving issue.
It's a real-world network cost issue.
The reason they probably didn't bother with your email (other than your obvious ignorance to the real issue at hand) is because they can't do much about it.
Most of the spam my server is hit with comes from places like Korea and China. What am I going to do, call in the A-Team to bust a spammer?
I had a buddy who was a gear head and use to race drag when we were in high school...
His car? A pinto. The car is so damned light that it beats a lot of muscle cars for the 1/4, and nothing, I mean nothing, is worth more than the look on the face of someone who was just beaten by a car known far as wide for it's lack of anything worthy.
I get a similar feeling when people realize they were just owned by my wife at CS.:)
While I know this is not your point, if XAML does gain a foot hold where XUL hasn't, it wouldn't do anyone good to just sit there with hands in lap, complaining.
While it's really hard to say "best" when comparing tech period, progression doesn't happen because of control, just market share does. XAML may have engineers behind it that have done a good job of finding the flaws in XUL and went to improve it. Unfortunately, that won't be the argument heard here.
If you need an example, take a look at the evolution of programming languages.
I've had people's little client-hugging applications do it with mine, then I get a "hey, why do you keep sending me viruses?" E-Mail. It's not automated.
Clearsign. You do have a MUA that can do that, right?
As far as my email accounts go, if you send me an email that doesn't at least have a text/plain portion, It never even gets queued. Doesn't matter if you're my best damned friend.
So I'm more willing to accept that you and I have different ideas of what acceptable mail policies are.
OTOH, I've seen one spammer (not several, one machine on their end) bring a machine that routes all the mail for a small group of users above 130 load average. It's a single proc AMD 2200 with the full availability of a T3. Mine is not the only machine on this network that repeatedly gets this treatment (it's a colocation facility - my wife works at the ISP so I get it for free, heh).
I was forced to move to lighter front end solutions such as messagewall because even the relatively simplistic QMail could not hold up.
And I have around.... 50 e-mail accounts that belong to myself and various people that I know (a gamer clan). Nowhere near 18 million at the minimum.
So as a mailer recipient that still likes to make things like postmaster@ accessible, I don't know if your position really concerns me. I imagine that AOL feels the same way.
I want to first say that I am one of hte last people to jump to the defense of AOL.
That's hardly an insightful comment.
18 million users means you care a heck a lot more about the impact of spam than pretty much any other network in the world.
And if you write your own little hacked up mail tool (like I have, to send legitimate, solicited email, not spam, heck, not even advertising) and start hitting AOL with bad SMTP envelopes, you're going to find them sending back 550's with a url.
I wish I could remember the url, but it dictates their "friendly mailer" policy. You don't follow this policy, you don't get to send AOL's users email.
To get them to let you send email again, you must call them and have a little chat with an email administrator. It's not a nice chat. It's a "don't fuck up again" chat. Thankfully, my boss made that call for me.:)
I've managed to trip up several large e-mail hosts like Yahoo and Hotmail, but AOL's is by far, the most draconian. Personally, I applaud it. I'd be overjoyed to get an email account with those kinds of practices, that I don't have to administer myself. I just can't stand the rest of the service. Perhaps my intentions were good, but I'm the exception to the rule as far as people who write these kinds of mailers go. I imagine that phone call rarely gets exercised.
This is how it was about a year and a half ago. I don't know how it is today.
If you really like tabs, there's a FF extension which maps the window open facility to creating a new tab. It's pretty damn nice, especially if you're fond of clicking links in emails.
The X consortium and Open Group are not non-profit enterprises.
Until XFree started really gaining momentum, you paid for all sorts of stuff related to implementing the X protocol - if you look hard you might still be able to find the reams of dead trees which are complete manuals (somewhere between 6-8 manuals, which could be used to hurt people when you eventually went crazy reading them). If you were implementing X and wanted any kind of say in it's design, you paid a hefty fee. In fact, this is still the case with one exception - the XFree86 team. Although, I imagine there's a similar case for the x.org guys now that the code is forked.
As a result, you may not have paid for X11 directly, but the cost of that SunOS box or HP/UX machine certainly had it in there. The cost of maintaining people who knew X like the back of their hand is certainly a real cost as well.
And UNIX was dead to everything but the most ardent of geeks and internet pushers during that period. The desktop was thriving. So, unless you had a NeXT box when you were growing up, please, put a sock in it. Thanks!:)
DOS was cheap and ran on cheap hardware. It also had the nice benefit of being very accessible for it's time to business users on a ease of use level. I don't ever recall a version of Lotus 1-2-3 that ran under anything remotely POSIX or anything that gave way to the POSIX specification.
Your assumption is that it takes a lot of planning.
Take a look at CPAN for a good detraction to your argument.
Most CPAN projects start pretty small and fill only a few features. Since search.cpan.org contains a pretty thorough revision history of most of these projects, you might find that useful.
Anyways, no one builds an app in perl with one all-encompassing module. They take bits and pieces that do what they need/now/ to build one. As their needs increase, they add to those bits and pieces. If the needs exceed the flexibility of the design, that's the time that redesign is required.
You can see a good example of your argument being executed poorly by examining some popular PHP applications, or you can just take a look at slashcode, which I apologize, should never have been released to the public.:)
PHP 4 in particular has horrid OOP support. I know perl's isn't much better, but I'll gladly take horrible perl OOP over that joke of OOP that's is the representation in PHP 4. It's much better in 5 I hear.
Anyways, that's just context, only to lead to the point. As a result, many of the applications in PHP lead to shoe-horning OOP features into a procedural interface - which is fine if you know what you're doing, but not really in anyone's best interest unless they still refuse to admit that OOP has merit and a place (only the biggest curmudgeons in the software industry - like jwz.:)
Either way, a lot of PHP authors try to implement things like plugins, namespaces, all sorts of crap which PHP 4 was not meant to do by craftily using includes and manipulating the names of functions.
I'm only using the PHP vs. Perl comparison because the distinct lack of features in PHP 4 that appeal to a designer of large applications fosters this kind of problem, and while it's pretty rude to make this assumption, only those who can't see that ahead of time doom themselves by writing large applications completely in PHP 4.
A good rule of software design: If you can't realize it without getting crafty, you've already done something wrong. Unnecessary complexity will always lead to failure. Take a look at windows.
Amongst other problems with PHP (like it's lack of a built-in database API that supports binds for all databases), that's why you see these applications on bugtraq all the damned time. Applications like Zope which are built on a foundation made to give the features an application like Zope needs help eliminate the most basic design flaws.
Just to bring my argument down from the heavens, I have on two occasions gone to great lengths to design giant API's that were flawed as soon as I plugged them into the editor. One of these designs kept me away from my editor for nearly 6 months, unless I was writing documentation. So, I would like to think that I'm speaking from experience on what/not/ to do when designing software.
If I had said, "what do these things really need to do", written them, and then said, "how can I make them operate better", I don't think I would have been in that position.
Mozilla is working off of Netscape's codebase, which is in turn based off of NCSA Mosaic. Small.
Firefox and Thunderbird are rewrites of the core of Mozilla. Again, relatively small. The plan last I heard is to eventually join them to form Mozilla 2.0. Both contain only small remnants of Netscape code and in general, are full rewrites.
I don't know as much about Eclipse, but in general, I'm not a big fan of "do it all" IDE's. I'd rather have something like vi or Emacs where vi is a very "one purpose" editor and Emacs is more or less a "here's a small concept with a bunch of stuff that takes advantage of that small concept". That "small concept" is elisp and some basic editing features. The "bloatedness" that most detractors complain about has more to do with the fact that the C core of Emacs is miniscule in comparison to the amount of lisp that supports it. While I can't say for sure, the C core of emacs probably rivals nvi in size, unless you count the various extensions to make things like rmail work.
Also, knowing how things like Eclipse and NetBeans work guts-wise, chances are that both of them have invested a lot of time into making the existing standard library do most of the work - GUI layouts in netbeans are little more than letting swing be introspective and tacking on "glue".
My last job had a bunch of CORBA-pushers and I just couldn't see the justification. CORBA is a very complex architecture and in general, is meant for seperate applications to share common (hence the 'C') knowledge about objects and classes. When you have control of all the apps in the equation, it seems pretty silly.
The reality of the situation is that most of the app (a web application) was written in perl and things like Storable and conduits such as memcached (or even NFS) are a much better fit. To achieve what they wanted, we would have to write a ton of C++ layers, bound with SWIG or the buggy libperl++, just to get to the point where we could start realizing parts of the design. It's extremely hard to realize a design when you find yourself designing it's dependencies as well. This is a good example of what Linus was talking about.
If eclipse really is a large (in the design concept - I really don't think Linus was talking about lines of code, especially if Java is the target here.:) project, it is most certainly an exception to the rule.
I'm not sure what you're saying, because windows is a complete platform... X11 is what requires an underlying platform.
Besides, X11R6 is a documented Open Group standard (unless my history is betraying me, the X Consortium forked from the Open Group) - "run on as many platforms" is not really realistic, unless you want to compare XFree86.
A semi-hidden point is that X11 (the standard) is flawed (too simple in goal and too complex in practice) and no amount of "freedom" will fix that.
Of course, I have Windows and Apple RDP on my Mac and X11 (XDarwin which is XFree's product and Apple's X11 which is not free).
So I have a serious choice to run GNOME or KDE on my Mac, but I'll be damned if I use it, and I haven't had a reason to since I bought the thing about 8 months ago.
Besides, if you haven't been paying attention (I have), the memory and processing requirement for X11 is astronomical in comparison to the windows GUI. I'm not even counting the overhead of GNOME or KDE.
Sure I am! If you want to convince yourself that I was saying anything positive about Windows design or that RMS was saying that Free Software is anything more than an ideal.
Of course, I didn't say either of those, you just assumed them.:)
All I said, was that Free Software has nothing to do with quality.
Of course, I'm modded as a 'troll'. Heaven forbid someone does something other than claim that free software can cure cancer, climb the tallest mountains and bring world peace.
'Trusted Computing' is nothing new, but automating trust is kind of an oxymoron, don't you think? I mean, even with a strong authentication, someone would just find some other hole in the system to exploit it.
Dunno, probably a lot of people who like Office, Photoshop, applications they've heard of...
People don't buy stick shifts anymore because automatics have reached a point where stick shift users are a fringe group who like the "grit" of performing the action. Automatics, in general use, have just as good or better gas mileage these days as their manual counterparts.
Do you see where I'm going here? No one likes RMS blabbering on about how software needs to be free, but everyone argues that OSS is better because of this and that and the reality is that in plenty of cases, the commercial counter-parts are arguably better. Anyone who's messed with the guts of X11 knows this much better than I - I walked away from that mess about as quickly as it took to execute 'less' on a piece of source code.
It's a simple question, really. Add a price tag to X11, and you're presented with a choice on equal ground. It was a choice that many UNIX geeks made for years before this crazy linux thing came along. The computer lab was there for a reason, and it wasn't because X11 was free.
There was also a time when things like AcceleratedX were preferable to XFree86, but again, cost money. I don't think I have to tell you where AccelX is in the software world for you to make the connection.
Although, IIRC there is a framework goes a long way to eliminate this (struts? Swing is really going out of it's way to have a unified look and feel, so I know it's not that), maybe I am thinking of something else. I've never really devoted a lot of time to programming java applications, mostly hobby work.
You pose an important question that's easily defeated, but important nonetheless.
If it runs on a video card that's acceptable for use, and you want the system bad enough, you either pay for the video card you want, or you bug your driver manufacturer to get X11 to work with it. If you and the rest of your followers are loud enough, you get a driver. Nvidia is a good example here, ATI is another. Radeon 2d specs are freely available - 3d is not. Yes, patent issues blur the lines but if X11 on ATI really was that popular, ATI would gladly jack up the price of their cards to pay gratuities to expose the code. Depending on the patent holder's agreement with ATI, you not buying ATI because it didn't run on X11 could effect their profits as well.
Either way, I guess it has more to do with the functionality of the system. Some cite that "people pay for MS Windows". That is true. Many times I am asked when I say, "have you checked out UNIX", they reply with "Does it run photoshop?". The people who ask this question are not going to take "well, it runs the GIMP" as an acceptable answer.
Personally, I got sick and tired of X11 a long time ago and bought a Mac. Worth every damned penny.
While I'm not intending to insult anyone's intelligence here,/. is a large group and some pay more attention to security and these kinds of attacks than others. Not to mention, too many people visit here to have "probability = 0" be a realistic assessment.
'Grandma' should never be in the position to install software, IMO. I've been talking to my grandmother about a linux installation for a while, and I will hold 'the keys' and help her out via ssh. As she's pretty set in her ways with her software choices, it should be pretty simple as far as time is concerned.
If you want to advocate linux, don't bother advocating education along with it. Really, if computers were easy to use as cars it would be one thing, but it's not the case currently and I don't see a future that is accepting of it. Not everyone wants to learn how to pay attention to computer security, heck, some people don't even care enough to program their VCR clock (I know, dated analogy, feh).
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I have no idea how you found that the sentence that you based your whole argument off of was in disagreement with it.
If auto makers were constantly pushing the ease of maintenance features on you, instead of the mechanic, I think you'd find that the norm would be quite different.
I mean, take a look at systems with goals like Mandrake. Terms like "Easy Linux", "Accessible Linux".... "Desktop Linux" are dropped so often that people have adopted it as if it's some panacea towards "saving" a OS which already has enough critical mass in the NOC to keep it's forward momentum. It's just stupid and reeks of a need to have something to strive for, regardless if it's pragmatic or not.
I'm not talking about marketing, you know.
When you have 18 million users, many of them who actually think they'll get something for free and "all they need to do is give out their email address", spam is not a face-saving issue.
It's a real-world network cost issue.
The reason they probably didn't bother with your email (other than your obvious ignorance to the real issue at hand) is because they can't do much about it.
Most of the spam my server is hit with comes from places like Korea and China. What am I going to do, call in the A-Team to bust a spammer?
I had a buddy who was a gear head and use to race drag when we were in high school...
:)
His car? A pinto. The car is so damned light that it beats a lot of muscle cars for the 1/4, and nothing, I mean nothing, is worth more than the look on the face of someone who was just beaten by a car known far as wide for it's lack of anything worthy.
I get a similar feeling when people realize they were just owned by my wife at CS.
Those customers complain and somebody makes an overbearing stink about it, and new customers don't come.
Reference: here
The stink gets advertised long before it's put into context.
First does not have any correlation to best.
While I know this is not your point, if XAML does gain a foot hold where XUL hasn't, it wouldn't do anyone good to just sit there with hands in lap, complaining.
While it's really hard to say "best" when comparing tech period, progression doesn't happen because of control, just market share does. XAML may have engineers behind it that have done a good job of finding the flaws in XUL and went to improve it. Unfortunately, that won't be the argument heard here.
If you need an example, take a look at the evolution of programming languages.
Ah, cool! I don't want to run a nightly, but it's good that it's integrated.
I've had people's little client-hugging applications do it with mine, then I get a "hey, why do you keep sending me viruses?" E-Mail. It's not automated.
.... 50 e-mail accounts that belong to myself and various people that I know (a gamer clan). Nowhere near 18 million at the minimum.
Clearsign. You do have a MUA that can do that, right?
As far as my email accounts go, if you send me an email that doesn't at least have a text/plain portion, It never even gets queued. Doesn't matter if you're my best damned friend.
So I'm more willing to accept that you and I have different ideas of what acceptable mail policies are.
OTOH, I've seen one spammer (not several, one machine on their end) bring a machine that routes all the mail for a small group of users above 130 load average. It's a single proc AMD 2200 with the full availability of a T3. Mine is not the only machine on this network that repeatedly gets this treatment (it's a colocation facility - my wife works at the ISP so I get it for free, heh).
I was forced to move to lighter front end solutions such as messagewall because even the relatively simplistic QMail could not hold up.
And I have around
So as a mailer recipient that still likes to make things like postmaster@ accessible, I don't know if your position really concerns me. I imagine that AOL feels the same way.
I want to first say that I am one of hte last people to jump to the defense of AOL.
:)
That's hardly an insightful comment.
18 million users means you care a heck a lot more about the impact of spam than pretty much any other network in the world.
And if you write your own little hacked up mail tool (like I have, to send legitimate, solicited email, not spam, heck, not even advertising) and start hitting AOL with bad SMTP envelopes, you're going to find them sending back 550's with a url.
I wish I could remember the url, but it dictates their "friendly mailer" policy. You don't follow this policy, you don't get to send AOL's users email.
To get them to let you send email again, you must call them and have a little chat with an email administrator. It's not a nice chat. It's a "don't fuck up again" chat. Thankfully, my boss made that call for me.
I've managed to trip up several large e-mail hosts like Yahoo and Hotmail, but AOL's is by far, the most draconian. Personally, I applaud it. I'd be overjoyed to get an email account with those kinds of practices, that I don't have to administer myself. I just can't stand the rest of the service. Perhaps my intentions were good, but I'm the exception to the rule as far as people who write these kinds of mailers go. I imagine that phone call rarely gets exercised.
This is how it was about a year and a half ago. I don't know how it is today.
If it wasn't obvious in my original post, it is now. I was arguing from hearsay. Thanks for clarifying things.
No, don't get me wrong, I wasn't pushing perl's OOP as something "great".
It's just that really, PHP 4's OOP makes perl's look like smalltalk in comparison.
If you really like tabs, there's a FF extension which maps the window open facility to creating a new tab. It's pretty damn nice, especially if you're fond of clicking links in emails.
The X consortium and Open Group are not non-profit enterprises.
:)
Until XFree started really gaining momentum, you paid for all sorts of stuff related to implementing the X protocol - if you look hard you might still be able to find the reams of dead trees which are complete manuals (somewhere between 6-8 manuals, which could be used to hurt people when you eventually went crazy reading them). If you were implementing X and wanted any kind of say in it's design, you paid a hefty fee. In fact, this is still the case with one exception - the XFree86 team. Although, I imagine there's a similar case for the x.org guys now that the code is forked.
As a result, you may not have paid for X11 directly, but the cost of that SunOS box or HP/UX machine certainly had it in there. The cost of maintaining people who knew X like the back of their hand is certainly a real cost as well.
And UNIX was dead to everything but the most ardent of geeks and internet pushers during that period. The desktop was thriving. So, unless you had a NeXT box when you were growing up, please, put a sock in it. Thanks!
DOS was cheap and ran on cheap hardware. It also had the nice benefit of being very accessible for it's time to business users on a ease of use level. I don't ever recall a version of Lotus 1-2-3 that ran under anything remotely POSIX or anything that gave way to the POSIX specification.
So please, it is that simple.
Your assumption is that it takes a lot of planning.
/now/ to build one. As their needs increase, they add to those bits and pieces. If the needs exceed the flexibility of the design, that's the time that redesign is required.
:)
:)
/not/ to do when designing software.
Take a look at CPAN for a good detraction to your argument.
Most CPAN projects start pretty small and fill only a few features. Since search.cpan.org contains a pretty thorough revision history of most of these projects, you might find that useful.
Anyways, no one builds an app in perl with one all-encompassing module. They take bits and pieces that do what they need
You can see a good example of your argument being executed poorly by examining some popular PHP applications, or you can just take a look at slashcode, which I apologize, should never have been released to the public.
PHP 4 in particular has horrid OOP support. I know perl's isn't much better, but I'll gladly take horrible perl OOP over that joke of OOP that's is the representation in PHP 4. It's much better in 5 I hear.
Anyways, that's just context, only to lead to the point. As a result, many of the applications in PHP lead to shoe-horning OOP features into a procedural interface - which is fine if you know what you're doing, but not really in anyone's best interest unless they still refuse to admit that OOP has merit and a place (only the biggest curmudgeons in the software industry - like jwz.
Either way, a lot of PHP authors try to implement things like plugins, namespaces, all sorts of crap which PHP 4 was not meant to do by craftily using includes and manipulating the names of functions.
I'm only using the PHP vs. Perl comparison because the distinct lack of features in PHP 4 that appeal to a designer of large applications fosters this kind of problem, and while it's pretty rude to make this assumption, only those who can't see that ahead of time doom themselves by writing large applications completely in PHP 4.
A good rule of software design: If you can't realize it without getting crafty, you've already done something wrong. Unnecessary complexity will always lead to failure. Take a look at windows.
Amongst other problems with PHP (like it's lack of a built-in database API that supports binds for all databases), that's why you see these applications on bugtraq all the damned time. Applications like Zope which are built on a foundation made to give the features an application like Zope needs help eliminate the most basic design flaws.
Just to bring my argument down from the heavens, I have on two occasions gone to great lengths to design giant API's that were flawed as soon as I plugged them into the editor. One of these designs kept me away from my editor for nearly 6 months, unless I was writing documentation. So, I would like to think that I'm speaking from experience on what
If I had said, "what do these things really need to do", written them, and then said, "how can I make them operate better", I don't think I would have been in that position.
I think your argument is slightly flawed.
:) project, it is most certainly an exception to the rule.
Mozilla is working off of Netscape's codebase, which is in turn based off of NCSA Mosaic. Small.
Firefox and Thunderbird are rewrites of the core of Mozilla. Again, relatively small. The plan last I heard is to eventually join them to form Mozilla 2.0. Both contain only small remnants of Netscape code and in general, are full rewrites.
I don't know as much about Eclipse, but in general, I'm not a big fan of "do it all" IDE's. I'd rather have something like vi or Emacs where vi is a very "one purpose" editor and Emacs is more or less a "here's a small concept with a bunch of stuff that takes advantage of that small concept". That "small concept" is elisp and some basic editing features. The "bloatedness" that most detractors complain about has more to do with the fact that the C core of Emacs is miniscule in comparison to the amount of lisp that supports it. While I can't say for sure, the C core of emacs probably rivals nvi in size, unless you count the various extensions to make things like rmail work.
Also, knowing how things like Eclipse and NetBeans work guts-wise, chances are that both of them have invested a lot of time into making the existing standard library do most of the work - GUI layouts in netbeans are little more than letting swing be introspective and tacking on "glue".
My last job had a bunch of CORBA-pushers and I just couldn't see the justification. CORBA is a very complex architecture and in general, is meant for seperate applications to share common (hence the 'C') knowledge about objects and classes. When you have control of all the apps in the equation, it seems pretty silly.
The reality of the situation is that most of the app (a web application) was written in perl and things like Storable and conduits such as memcached (or even NFS) are a much better fit. To achieve what they wanted, we would have to write a ton of C++ layers, bound with SWIG or the buggy libperl++, just to get to the point where we could start realizing parts of the design. It's extremely hard to realize a design when you find yourself designing it's dependencies as well. This is a good example of what Linus was talking about.
If eclipse really is a large (in the design concept - I really don't think Linus was talking about lines of code, especially if Java is the target here.
I'm not sure what you're saying, because windows is a complete platform... X11 is what requires an underlying platform.
Besides, X11R6 is a documented Open Group standard (unless my history is betraying me, the X Consortium forked from the Open Group) - "run on as many platforms" is not really realistic, unless you want to compare XFree86.
A semi-hidden point is that X11 (the standard) is flawed (too simple in goal and too complex in practice) and no amount of "freedom" will fix that.
Of course, I have Windows and Apple RDP on my Mac and X11 (XDarwin which is XFree's product and Apple's X11 which is not free).
So I have a serious choice to run GNOME or KDE on my Mac, but I'll be damned if I use it, and I haven't had a reason to since I bought the thing about 8 months ago.
Besides, if you haven't been paying attention (I have), the memory and processing requirement for X11 is astronomical in comparison to the windows GUI. I'm not even counting the overhead of GNOME or KDE.
Sure I am! If you want to convince yourself that I was saying anything positive about Windows design or that RMS was saying that Free Software is anything more than an ideal.
:)
Of course, I didn't say either of those, you just assumed them.
Did I question that it wasn't?
All I said, was that Free Software has nothing to do with quality.
Of course, I'm modded as a 'troll'. Heaven forbid someone does something other than claim that free software can cure cancer, climb the tallest mountains and bring world peace.
You must be a user where I work, grow a pair, because that high pitched whine is starting to get annoying.
Yyyeah.
You don't write a lot of custom patches, do you?
Actually, I'm not sure if it would.
'Trusted Computing' is nothing new, but automating trust is kind of an oxymoron, don't you think? I mean, even with a strong authentication, someone would just find some other hole in the system to exploit it.
Dunno, probably a lot of people who like Office, Photoshop, applications they've heard of...
People don't buy stick shifts anymore because automatics have reached a point where stick shift users are a fringe group who like the "grit" of performing the action. Automatics, in general use, have just as good or better gas mileage these days as their manual counterparts.
Do you see where I'm going here? No one likes RMS blabbering on about how software needs to be free, but everyone argues that OSS is better because of this and that and the reality is that in plenty of cases, the commercial counter-parts are arguably better. Anyone who's messed with the guts of X11 knows this much better than I - I walked away from that mess about as quickly as it took to execute 'less' on a piece of source code.
X11 is a mess and it's progression shows it.
Free Software has nothing to do with quality.
It's a simple question, really. Add a price tag to X11, and you're presented with a choice on equal ground. It was a choice that many UNIX geeks made for years before this crazy linux thing came along. The computer lab was there for a reason, and it wasn't because X11 was free.
There was also a time when things like AcceleratedX were preferable to XFree86, but again, cost money. I don't think I have to tell you where AccelX is in the software world for you to make the connection.
Yeah, I thought about it after I posted that.
Although, IIRC there is a framework goes a long way to eliminate this (struts? Swing is really going out of it's way to have a unified look and feel, so I know it's not that), maybe I am thinking of something else. I've never really devoted a lot of time to programming java applications, mostly hobby work.
You pose an important question that's easily defeated, but important nonetheless.
If it runs on a video card that's acceptable for use, and you want the system bad enough, you either pay for the video card you want, or you bug your driver manufacturer to get X11 to work with it. If you and the rest of your followers are loud enough, you get a driver. Nvidia is a good example here, ATI is another. Radeon 2d specs are freely available - 3d is not. Yes, patent issues blur the lines but if X11 on ATI really was that popular, ATI would gladly jack up the price of their cards to pay gratuities to expose the code. Depending on the patent holder's agreement with ATI, you not buying ATI because it didn't run on X11 could effect their profits as well.
Either way, I guess it has more to do with the functionality of the system. Some cite that "people pay for MS Windows". That is true. Many times I am asked when I say, "have you checked out UNIX", they reply with "Does it run photoshop?". The people who ask this question are not going to take "well, it runs the GIMP" as an acceptable answer.
Personally, I got sick and tired of X11 a long time ago and bought a Mac. Worth every damned penny.
You have got to be kidding me.
/. is a large group and some pay more attention to security and these kinds of attacks than others. Not to mention, too many people visit here to have "probability = 0" be a realistic assessment.
While I'm not intending to insult anyone's intelligence here,
'Grandma' should never be in the position to install software, IMO. I've been talking to my grandmother about a linux installation for a while, and I will hold 'the keys' and help her out via ssh. As she's pretty set in her ways with her software choices, it should be pretty simple as far as time is concerned.
If you want to advocate linux, don't bother advocating education along with it. Really, if computers were easy to use as cars it would be one thing, but it's not the case currently and I don't see a future that is accepting of it. Not everyone wants to learn how to pay attention to computer security, heck, some people don't even care enough to program their VCR clock (I know, dated analogy, feh).