Re:Separating Linux users from Windows users
on
The Spyware Inferno
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· Score: 1
(I know there's some Adware out there, but I
can't imagine it being terribly successful).
*cough* Opera *cough*.
Of course, Opera is a real, useful program and its ads aren't usually intrusive. It's an up-front deal--you get to use commercial software for free in exchange for a small bit of screen real-estate. Most Windows-based Adware is a) deceptive about that sort of deal and b) sucks.
The Snack library (homepage here) provides high-level manipulation of a wide variety of audio formats (including MP3) to Python, Tcl and Ruby. It's already been used to write several applications including a sound editor and an MP3 player .
All of the scripting languages I listed also support the Tk widget set so you can get a GUI up and running quickly. Plus, since it's all cross-platform, you'll easily be able to port your work to *nix or MacOS.
At least, their decapitalizaton of Internet is. I can see the word "web" making sense as a lowercase word, but not Internet.
An internet (lower-case "i") is any computer network which connects several networks together. I.e., an "inter network". For example, if I disconnected the DSL line at home and then ran an Ethernet cable from my router to the neighbours', I'd have my own internet.
The Internet that we all know and love and use to download pr0n is the name of one such specific internet. Thus, we need the capitalization to distinguish between an internet and The Internet.
I think Wired just heard the old saw about the capitalists being the first against the wall and got confused.
Yeah, I realize that the extension is a joke, but something like it would actually be a good idea. If the ad views actually earned money for the Mozilla foundation, people could voluntarily(!) install the adbar as a cashless donation. A lot of people who wouldn't want to pay money for a web browser--even if it's a voluntary donation--may be willing to view ads instead.
Who TF said anything about hating America? I don't know where you got that from...either you're totally off your knocker, or you're smoking too much pot.
Relax, dude, it's a joke, one of several that I sprinkled through the post to try to keep it from getting too intense.
The "America" comment is a reference to the "Why do you hate America?" meme. That is, to respond to any criticism of the current government with the aforementioned question.
For example:
"George W. Bush is a corrupt war-monger!"
"Why do you hate America?"
The thing is, this is how the American right wing actually does respond to a lot of its critics--by accusing them of being unpatriotic. This is a really clever way of confusing the issue but if you reduce it to five words, the whole thing becomes silly.
On some of the USENET groups I frequent, it's become common to follow up to any criticism of the government with that question, just as a joke. I'd sort of assumed that it had made its way to Slashdot as well since I'm almost always last in line when the memes get handed out.
Also, I never smoke pot but anyone who knows me will tell you I've been off my rocker for a long time.
I tried explaining that those are exactly the sort of
differences that people look at (in addition to form of worship etc)
to argue against the inferiority of other religions, when it doesn't
really matter, since all of them teach us to pray and have faith, and
behave in a "good" way.
Actually, you're the intolerant one.
Let me explain.
Religious tolerance boils down to one simple principal: everyone
is allowed to choose which god(s) they will worship. If I
don't believe in your god, you're allowed to disagree with me, to
express your disagreement when asked and to discuss or debate the
issue with me in a civilized manner.
It doesn't turn into intolerance until you try to coerce me
into believing in your god.
(The real problem with a lot of religious people is not that
they're intolerant but that they're rude and obnoxious when they
attempt to debate the issue. That and they're typically crappy
debaters. The job of a missionary is to explain what he (or she)
believes. The actual decision must be left to the listener.
And yes, there are abuses, but it's those and not the concept
of the missionary that are the problem.)
In summary:
Tolerance (Polite):
"No, I don't agree with your beliefs. But let me know if you
ever want to talk to me about it."
Tolerance (Impolite):
"REPENT SINNER! REPENT, I SAY!!!!"
Intolerance:
"If you don't convert to my religion right now, I'm going to shoot
you in the kneecaps and watch you bleed to death."
Got it?
The problem with these "all gods are one" movements is that they
contradict a basic tenant of a lot of major religions, namely the idea
that that particular religion is the only one. For example, both
Christianity and Islam hold that. If you remove it, you get a
different religion. So those people who say that we should get rid of religions that
claim to be the Only Way are really saying that everyone should
convert to their religion. The most disturbing thing is that a
lot of these folks imply that their views should be forced on
everyone.
That's why I called you intolerant. (Well, that and it makes for
a snappy opening.) What you're basically saying is, "Anyone who
disagrees with my belief is Bad For Humanity."
Osama bin Laden says that too.
Er, not that I mean to compare you to a mass-murdering terrorist,
but I trust you see what I mean.
Everyone believes their
religion is the One True Way and that includes people who oppose the
very concept of One True Way. While you haven't tried to force
conversions at gunpoint, you did imply that anyone who believed
something different was "intolerant" and, by extension, bad for
humanity.
In other words, you attempted to coerce people into adopting your
viewpoint by means of a false dichotomy. Why, oh why, do you hate
America so?
One final mostly-unrelated note: It's a basic tenet of
Christianity that you must choose to become a Christian of your
own free will. That's pretty basic doctrine and it's fundamental to
mainstream North American Christianity. Some fundies push it a bit,
yes, but it's pretty ingrained.
That's why fundies, for all their annoying behaviour and occasional doomsday
cults, aren't anywhere near as dangerous to our way of life as most
slashdotters seem to think.
I'm all for respecting copyrights but I don't trust the organization that's saying it.
The BSA is, for all practical purposes, a vigilante group. They can behave like one (without actually meeting the legal definition of one, probably) because it's generally cheaper to let them have their way than it is to fight them in court, even if you're innocent. As such, they get to play Secret Police on whoever they feel like.
I'm all for respecting rule of law but I don't think they're in any position to tell me about it.
(Disclaimer: this is my opinion only, based on what I've read about the organization's activities.)
If Windows XP ran as well under OSX as it did on a PC then Mircosoft will sell a Heck of a lot more coppies and also kill off a lot of Mac ports.
Actually, PC emulators (hardware or software) have been available for the Mac for a long time. If anything, widespread Windows compatibility would increase Apple's market share.
Remember, Apple computers are marketed as a better computer that costs more. They are, in effect, BMW to Microsoft's GM. Mac owners bought their computers for the coolness factor and being able to run PC software on it just means that those folks who would have bought a Mac if only they could run $APP on it now will.
On the other hand, something in the reverse direction might also be good for Apple. What they should do--should have been been doing for the last four years, actually--is to maintain and push OPENSTEP for Windows and Unix, improving it to the point where you can port your app with one click. That way, you can write your app primarily for Windows and still have a Mac version for free.
As it is, the Mac market share is so small that it's rarely worth writing applications for it. A lot of companies are leaving the Mac because the numbers of copies they'll sell don't cover the cost of development anymore. Having a good cross-platform API will let developers trivially (and cheaply!) port their programs back to the Mac.
A much more interesting question is what would have happened if
NeXT had not got the crazy idea of making its own hardware systems and
had come out as a 100% software O/S from the start.
Nothing. At all. At the time, making their own hardware was the
best option.
When NeXT started out in 1986, there was no such thing as a
commodity personal computer. There were IBM clones but they weren't
anywhere near standardised and in any case, the most advanced of them
were based on the 80286, a thoroughly shitty 16-bit processor.
The other players--Apple, Atari, Commodore and others I'm
forgetting--were mostly better in that they generally used 680x0 CPUs
but they still weren't particularly decent. They certainly wouldn't
have run NeXT's software.
But they're irrelevant because the NeXT systems were
workstations, not personal computers. Workstations were the
serious computers of the day. They were still single-user
(mostly) systems but they were fullblown Unix boxes. If you wanted to
do any sort of scientific or industrial computation, that's what you
got. They were priced in the $10k-$100k range and the big-name
players in that arena were (IIRC) Sun, HP, DEC, IBM and SGI (and
probably others) and NeXT was competing with them.
If NeXT had gone software-only, they would have had to pick their
platform(s) with no clear winner in sight, then live or die at the
mercy of its vendor. They would also have missed out on the huge
piles of money they made by building and selling hardware. In those
days, there was still big money in proprietary hardware.
IMHO, NeXT went software-only at about the right time, just as
commodity (IBM-compatible) PCs were getting powerful enough to eat the
workstation market. I doubt, though, that that would have been enough
to save the company. Once you get into the PC operating system
market, Microsoft will kill you, as Be found out.
Just before Apple bought them, they were selling OPENSTEP, the
NeXTStep API and framework ported to a variety of platforms (including
Windows NT). I suspect that if they hadn't taken over Apple, we'd all
be developing our "real" apps for OPENSTEP now (or GNUStep if you're a
Debian user) and porting them as necessary.
As an aside, Apple is in a pretty wierd place. They're a
throwback to the '80s when it was still enormously profitable to make
computer hardware. It isn't anymore (although Apple seems to still
make a modest profit from it) but they've got a tiger by the tail--if
they move to commodity hardware, they have to compete with Microsoft
who can and will kill them.
Their current strategy is to stay out of MS's range by remaining
incompatible with PCs, all the while using as many commodity parts as
possible and focusing on innovation and good industrial design. Given
those strengths, I wouldn't be surprised if they minimized the
computer business or got out of it entirely. They're currently much
more adept at competing with the likes of Sony.
A lot of the discussion going on here (and in the linked article) is of the form "Linux won't be ready for the desktop until it does X" or "Linux is ready for the desktop because it does all these things better than Windows.". This is all missing the point.
Yes, modern "end-user friendly" Linux distributions are pretty close to Windows in terms of usability, but that's not the point.
Windows has infiltrated our culture. It has become synonymous with computing. It is assumed that if you have a computer, you're running Windows (or maybe a Mac if you live in a more liberal area).
The reason Mandrake (or Linspire, Xandros or others in that crowd) isn't good enough for Grandma isn't that the software is harder to use than Windows. It's that whenever she needs any kind of help or advice--be it from her ISP, her online banking tech support, the local computer shop, the kid down the street, the community college, mainstream books and all the other sources of information--it will always be Windows-centric.
Linux won't be ready for the desktop until the first response to a request for help is no longer "What version of Windows are you running?"
I noticed this too and I adapted. I've been writing code for a living and for fun for a while now.
Actually, I still enjoy doing the stuff I get paid for, so I guess I'm ahead in the game.
My thoughts:
You will be less productive on your hobby projects. Get used to it. It's going to take you a lot longer to get anything done.
If you don't feel like doing it, don't. This is supposed to be for fun and if it's not fun, it's not worth doing. Or at least, it's not worth doing now. You can always put it down and go play Doom.
That being said, it is worthwhile from a psychological point of view to finish your projects. Just remember, though, that you don't have a deadline.
Do stuff that's wildly different from what you normally do at work. I, for example, do C and assembly stuff at work so at home, I do web stuff in Smalltalk. This is also good advice from a career management point of view. Learning new skills makes you more employable. Learn Lisp, Smalltalk, functional programming, Prolog, web applications, machine language, databases and anything else in the field that seems even remotely interesting.
Consider giving up TV. If you absolutely must see certain shows, tape them and watch them on a day when you feel too tired to do anything useful. Not only do you save your useful hours that way but you also get to skip commercials, saving you some twenty minutes per hour of TV. (DVD box sets are also good for that.) Whatever you do, don't just turn on the tube and channel-surf until you find something tolerable. That's the time sink.
As a longer-term strategy, plan to work for someone who doesn't require you to spend nine hours a day on the job. The normal work day should be eight hours, including breaks and lunch. A wise employer knows that extra-long hours leads to dimishing returns very quickly.
It's not fucking complicated how to fix it, and the solution works for every browser out there: Stop letting web pages turn off the URL box and menus. DUH.
Not quite. The reason you can do this is so that you can use XUL to turn Mozilla into a custom app. For example, you could use Firefox as the front end for an in-house POS system where the terminals are just running web browsers and the smarts are in a server on the other end of a LAN. In that case, you don't want the client to look like a web browser at all, lest the staff start getting ideas. The fact that XUL is powerful is not the problem.
It's also really handy that you can, simply by clicking on a link on a web page (and clicking the "OK" button on the confirmation prompt), change the look and feel of your browser. This is also a really nice feature. (Well, not until someone writes goatse.xpi, anyway.)
The real problem is the combination of the two, that the extensions you can download with the click of a mouse also have pants-down-bent-over access to the web browser's capabilities.
The Right Solution (IMHO) is to split extensions into two groups with different extensions and MIME-types. One is easy to load but is really restricted in what it can do to the browser, the other has the run of the system but needs to be downloaded to disk and then explicitly installed using a separate Extension Manager. That way, there's a big perceptual step between doing something relatively harmless and something that could compromise security.
(The extension manager itself could probably be a browser tool. However, for installing extensions system-wide as root under *nix, we'll also need a command-line tool analogous to rpm or dpkg.)
First, this article blindly repeats the lie that for artists to get
paid, they (or their publishers) need control over
distribution. This isn't true; they just need to get paid. Control
is one way to do so but there are others. For example, compulsory
licenses pay the artists without giving them control over
distribution.
(Cory Doctorow does this better than me, here.
ObAttribution: This link was stolen from other Slashdot posts.)
Secondly, the article way overstates the importance of big publishers.
I'm convinced that the future lies with the small publishers, the
ones that can't afford to pay a decent advance but will do a
good job editing and make sure that their books are good.
Those publishers will embrace DRM-less ebooks because they have
nothing to lose. And someday, one of those DRM-less ebooks will be a
huge best-seller, and that'll open the door for reasonable ebooks.
Until then, I'll just use Plucker to read free html ebooks like My Tokyo Death
Cult on my Visor.
This is so going to suck. If I get an error message that I'm unfamiliar with I'll plug it into google. Even if the hit is in a language I don't understand I can usually work out
what a solution to my problem may be by looking at the command sequences posted in replies.
I don't think this will be a problem. All it means is that you'll only get the English-language hits when you do your search, since the (say) Russian error messages will be posted to Russian-language lists.
Getting a mole into Green Hills Software, Microsoft, etc...
Forget moles. You just need a backdoor into their development system. One Outlook worm or IE exploit is all you'd need to install the change. Frankly, I'd be surprised if it hasn't already happened.
At least with F/OSS, there's going to be a huge group of users casually browsing the sources. The odds are good that someone is going to find the trojan, just like there's a good chance that most of the bugs will be found. With proprietary software, there aren't enough people with access to the source.
Besides, F/OSS developers learn to be paranoid about open networks. That's why so many of them use checksums and GPG signatures for downloads and patches. I very much doubt that the developers of proprietary software are going to be that cautious about internal communication, even when there are people using ancient unpatched versions of Outlook Express to read their email on computers that are inside the firewall. They're going to assume that the patch that just got mailed to them has been tested and signed off on by its developer because just because it came from his machine.
This is really easy to stop. For all we talk about campaign contribution and corporate influence, Hatch is still accountable to the people. If you want to kick him out of office, just get the voters mad at him. All the campaign contributions in the world won't get him re-elected if the voters hate him.
And none of the voters like this bill. The only reason he's getting away with it is that most people don't know about it at all. (What? The mainstream media isn't reporting on it? Shocking!)
So get the word out. Write a pamphlet that describes this in a way ordinary (non-geek) folk will find informative (think "VCRs made illegal", not "stifling innovation"), put it online and get people in those areas to print up copies and hand them out door to door.
Be sure to ask the recipients to write to Hatch et., al about this as well. There's nothing like a flood of angry letters to get a politician to back off.
Some of this has already been touched on by other posters, but not quite exactly the way I had it in mind, so...
My idea is to have Firefox examine web-pages as they are loaded and decide, based on the user's previous decisions, whether it should disable certain features before displaying it. More specifically:
Add (if they aren't there already) fine-grained security profiles that can be associated with each domain, website, IP block, etc. By security profile, I mean a collection of settings for each web-browser feature. For example, I might want to disable sound on a particular website but leave it going in general.
Set a reasonable default profile that gets used for most pages.
Provide an easy-to-understand interface for manually overriding the default profile and enabling a particular feature. For example, if the security profile for a page doesn't allow flash, there should be a big, visible button nearby labeled "Enable Flash For This Page" that does just that.
And here's the machine-learning bit: have the browser analyze each page as it loads, comparing its content with other pages that the user has looked at, and try to figure out if it should disable (but never enable--that's too dangerous) features beyond what the default security profile allows. For example, if I've consistently disabled images whenever I've come to a page containing the phrase "open-source rectal exam", the browser should automatically disable image loading when it finds that phrase.
(Note: I haven't had a chance to play with any recent Mozilla product in any depth so I don't know how much of what I've described is already there. Apologies if I've partially reinvented the wheel.)
this could be a good thing. Remember, it was Sony that fought for the VCR..
More importantly, Sony makes more money from selling MP3 players and related hardware than it does from selling records. That's why they've never been overly enthusiastic supporters of the whole DRM bandwagon.
The big question is whether this will still be the case post-merger. If so, they may end up edging toward the business model of using their music division as a way to drive the sale of players.
IANAL, but I have heard one speak on the subject and according to him, file formats are copyrightable. However, whether or not this is sufficient to prevent third-party implementations of the format has not, as far as I know, been tested. There's apparently a pretty good case for unauthorized implementations not being infringement.
Of course, that doesn't make the SCO argument any less bogus, given that it was released as an open standard. I have no doubt that they'll fail on their claim that they own the standard long before the whole issue of file format copyrightability comes up.
Y'know, this sort of thing is perfect for open-source hardware projects.
Typically, if a group wants to develop a Cool New Machine, they can do the actual R&D online with CAD software and possibly build a few prototypes. However, once the design is actually done, there's nowhere else to go with it unless they can convince some hardware manufacture that it'll sell enough to justify a production run.
But now, they just need to convert the design to whatever format Pad2Pad uses and put it up for download. Anyone who wants one just needs to send in a copy and a credit card number and they're done.
You can still get it, at least as source code,
from here. I still use it and it works reasonably well.
It has a nice, friendly Configure script that'll get it to build on modern Linux systems without any fuss.
The main problems with it are that the Q00L new features are poorly documented, as is how to turn them off, and the that the source code is terrifying. Remember, this was the program that Larry Wall was going to rewrite just before he got distracted by Perl, after which it switched maintainers before finally being (apparently) abandoned.
Still, for all its problems, I haven't found a better news reader. I considered XEmacs GNUS for a while but configuring it is harder to do than just writing your own news reader.
Slashdot Mirror
(I know there's some Adware out there, but I can't imagine it being terribly successful).
*cough* Opera *cough*.
Of course, Opera is a real, useful program and its ads aren't usually intrusive. It's an up-front deal--you get to use commercial software for free in exchange for a small bit of screen real-estate. Most Windows-based Adware is a) deceptive about that sort of deal and b) sucks.
The Snack library (homepage here) provides high-level manipulation of a wide variety of audio formats (including MP3) to Python, Tcl and Ruby. It's already been used to write several applications including a sound editor and an MP3 player .
All of the scripting languages I listed also support the Tk widget set so you can get a GUI up and running quickly. Plus, since it's all cross-platform, you'll easily be able to port your work to *nix or MacOS.
At least, their decapitalizaton of Internet is. I can see the word "web" making sense as a lowercase word, but not Internet.
An internet (lower-case "i") is any computer network which connects several networks together. I.e., an "inter network". For example, if I disconnected the DSL line at home and then ran an Ethernet cable from my router to the neighbours', I'd have my own internet.
The Internet that we all know and love and use to download pr0n is the name of one such specific internet. Thus, we need the capitalization to distinguish between an internet and The Internet.
I think Wired just heard the old saw about the capitalists being the first against the wall and got confused.
Yeah, I realize that the extension is a joke, but something like it would actually be a good idea. If the ad views actually earned money for the Mozilla foundation, people could voluntarily(!) install the adbar as a cashless donation. A lot of people who wouldn't want to pay money for a web browser--even if it's a voluntary donation--may be willing to view ads instead.
It's certainly worth trying, anyway.
Who TF said anything about hating America? I don't know where you got that from...either you're totally off your knocker, or you're smoking too much pot.
Relax, dude, it's a joke, one of several that I sprinkled through the post to try to keep it from getting too intense.
The "America" comment is a reference to the "Why do you hate America?" meme. That is, to respond to any criticism of the current government with the aforementioned question.
For example:
"George W. Bush is a corrupt war-monger!"
"Why do you hate America?"
The thing is, this is how the American right wing actually does respond to a lot of its critics--by accusing them of being unpatriotic. This is a really clever way of confusing the issue but if you reduce it to five words, the whole thing becomes silly.
On some of the USENET groups I frequent, it's become common to follow up to any criticism of the government with that question, just as a joke. I'd sort of assumed that it had made its way to Slashdot as well since I'm almost always last in line when the memes get handed out.
Also, I never smoke pot but anyone who knows me will tell you I've been off my rocker for a long time.
I tried explaining that those are exactly the sort of differences that people look at (in addition to form of worship etc) to argue against the inferiority of other religions, when it doesn't really matter, since all of them teach us to pray and have faith, and behave in a "good" way.
Actually, you're the intolerant one.
Let me explain.
Religious tolerance boils down to one simple principal: everyone is allowed to choose which god(s) they will worship. If I don't believe in your god, you're allowed to disagree with me, to express your disagreement when asked and to discuss or debate the issue with me in a civilized manner.
It doesn't turn into intolerance until you try to coerce me into believing in your god.
(The real problem with a lot of religious people is not that they're intolerant but that they're rude and obnoxious when they attempt to debate the issue. That and they're typically crappy debaters. The job of a missionary is to explain what he (or she) believes. The actual decision must be left to the listener. And yes, there are abuses, but it's those and not the concept of the missionary that are the problem.)
In summary:
Tolerance (Polite): "No, I don't agree with your beliefs. But let me know if you ever want to talk to me about it." Tolerance (Impolite): "REPENT SINNER! REPENT, I SAY!!!!" Intolerance: "If you don't convert to my religion right now, I'm going to shoot you in the kneecaps and watch you bleed to death."Got it?
The problem with these "all gods are one" movements is that they contradict a basic tenant of a lot of major religions, namely the idea that that particular religion is the only one. For example, both Christianity and Islam hold that. If you remove it, you get a different religion. So those people who say that we should get rid of religions that claim to be the Only Way are really saying that everyone should convert to their religion. The most disturbing thing is that a lot of these folks imply that their views should be forced on everyone.
That's why I called you intolerant. (Well, that and it makes for a snappy opening.) What you're basically saying is, "Anyone who disagrees with my belief is Bad For Humanity."
Osama bin Laden says that too.
Er, not that I mean to compare you to a mass-murdering terrorist, but I trust you see what I mean.
Everyone believes their religion is the One True Way and that includes people who oppose the very concept of One True Way. While you haven't tried to force conversions at gunpoint, you did imply that anyone who believed something different was "intolerant" and, by extension, bad for humanity.
In other words, you attempted to coerce people into adopting your viewpoint by means of a false dichotomy. Why, oh why, do you hate America so?
One final mostly-unrelated note: It's a basic tenet of Christianity that you must choose to become a Christian of your own free will. That's pretty basic doctrine and it's fundamental to mainstream North American Christianity. Some fundies push it a bit, yes, but it's pretty ingrained. That's why fundies, for all their annoying behaviour and occasional doomsday cults, aren't anywhere near as dangerous to our way of life as most slashdotters seem to think.
Because Our Techno-Dystopia Isn't Hellish Enough.
How long 'til this becomes mandatory for employment? Or citizenship?
Me? Pessimistic? Nah.
This is bad because... ?
I'm all for respecting copyrights but I don't trust the organization that's saying it.
The BSA is, for all practical purposes, a vigilante group. They can behave like one (without actually meeting the legal definition of one, probably) because it's generally cheaper to let them have their way than it is to fight them in court, even if you're innocent. As such, they get to play Secret Police on whoever they feel like.
I'm all for respecting rule of law but I don't think they're in any position to tell me about it.
(Disclaimer: this is my opinion only, based on what I've read about the organization's activities.)
Piracy Deepfreeze
Stop the pirates from freezing the city! Throw your ball into the pirates and their stolen software before they hit the ground.
Please post a torrent link for this game.
Thanks.
If Windows XP ran as well under OSX as it did on a PC then Mircosoft will sell a Heck of a lot more coppies and also kill off a lot of Mac ports.
Actually, PC emulators (hardware or software) have been available for the Mac for a long time. If anything, widespread Windows compatibility would increase Apple's market share.
Remember, Apple computers are marketed as a better computer that costs more. They are, in effect, BMW to Microsoft's GM. Mac owners bought their computers for the coolness factor and being able to run PC software on it just means that those folks who would have bought a Mac if only they could run $APP on it now will.
On the other hand, something in the reverse direction might also be good for Apple. What they should do--should have been been doing for the last four years, actually--is to maintain and push OPENSTEP for Windows and Unix, improving it to the point where you can port your app with one click. That way, you can write your app primarily for Windows and still have a Mac version for free.
As it is, the Mac market share is so small that it's rarely worth writing applications for it. A lot of companies are leaving the Mac because the numbers of copies they'll sell don't cover the cost of development anymore. Having a good cross-platform API will let developers trivially (and cheaply!) port their programs back to the Mac.
A much more interesting question is what would have happened if NeXT had not got the crazy idea of making its own hardware systems and had come out as a 100% software O/S from the start.
Nothing. At all. At the time, making their own hardware was the best option.
When NeXT started out in 1986, there was no such thing as a commodity personal computer. There were IBM clones but they weren't anywhere near standardised and in any case, the most advanced of them were based on the 80286, a thoroughly shitty 16-bit processor.
The other players--Apple, Atari, Commodore and others I'm forgetting--were mostly better in that they generally used 680x0 CPUs but they still weren't particularly decent. They certainly wouldn't have run NeXT's software.
But they're irrelevant because the NeXT systems were workstations, not personal computers. Workstations were the serious computers of the day. They were still single-user (mostly) systems but they were fullblown Unix boxes. If you wanted to do any sort of scientific or industrial computation, that's what you got. They were priced in the $10k-$100k range and the big-name players in that arena were (IIRC) Sun, HP, DEC, IBM and SGI (and probably others) and NeXT was competing with them.
If NeXT had gone software-only, they would have had to pick their platform(s) with no clear winner in sight, then live or die at the mercy of its vendor. They would also have missed out on the huge piles of money they made by building and selling hardware. In those days, there was still big money in proprietary hardware.
IMHO, NeXT went software-only at about the right time, just as commodity (IBM-compatible) PCs were getting powerful enough to eat the workstation market. I doubt, though, that that would have been enough to save the company. Once you get into the PC operating system market, Microsoft will kill you, as Be found out.
Just before Apple bought them, they were selling OPENSTEP, the NeXTStep API and framework ported to a variety of platforms (including Windows NT). I suspect that if they hadn't taken over Apple, we'd all be developing our "real" apps for OPENSTEP now (or GNUStep if you're a Debian user) and porting them as necessary.
ObCitation: here.
As an aside, Apple is in a pretty wierd place. They're a throwback to the '80s when it was still enormously profitable to make computer hardware. It isn't anymore (although Apple seems to still make a modest profit from it) but they've got a tiger by the tail--if they move to commodity hardware, they have to compete with Microsoft who can and will kill them.
Their current strategy is to stay out of MS's range by remaining incompatible with PCs, all the while using as many commodity parts as possible and focusing on innovation and good industrial design. Given those strengths, I wouldn't be surprised if they minimized the computer business or got out of it entirely. They're currently much more adept at competing with the likes of Sony.
A lot of the discussion going on here (and in the linked article) is of the form "Linux won't be ready for the desktop until it does X" or "Linux is ready for the desktop because it does all these things better than Windows.". This is all missing the point.
Yes, modern "end-user friendly" Linux distributions are pretty close to Windows in terms of usability, but that's not the point. Windows has infiltrated our culture. It has become synonymous with computing. It is assumed that if you have a computer, you're running Windows (or maybe a Mac if you live in a more liberal area).
The reason Mandrake (or Linspire, Xandros or others in that crowd) isn't good enough for Grandma isn't that the software is harder to use than Windows. It's that whenever she needs any kind of help or advice--be it from her ISP, her online banking tech support, the local computer shop, the kid down the street, the community college, mainstream books and all the other sources of information--it will always be Windows-centric.
Linux won't be ready for the desktop until the first response to a request for help is no longer "What version of Windows are you running?"
I noticed this too and I adapted. I've been writing code for a living and for fun for a while now.
Actually, I still enjoy doing the stuff I get paid for, so I guess I'm ahead in the game.
My thoughts:
Good luck.
It's not fucking complicated how to fix it, and the solution works for every browser out there: Stop letting web pages turn off the URL box and menus. DUH.
Not quite. The reason you can do this is so that you can use XUL to turn Mozilla into a custom app. For example, you could use Firefox as the front end for an in-house POS system where the terminals are just running web browsers and the smarts are in a server on the other end of a LAN. In that case, you don't want the client to look like a web browser at all, lest the staff start getting ideas. The fact that XUL is powerful is not the problem.
It's also really handy that you can, simply by clicking on a link on a web page (and clicking the "OK" button on the confirmation prompt), change the look and feel of your browser. This is also a really nice feature. (Well, not until someone writes goatse.xpi, anyway.)
The real problem is the combination of the two, that the extensions you can download with the click of a mouse also have pants-down-bent-over access to the web browser's capabilities.
The Right Solution (IMHO) is to split extensions into two groups with different extensions and MIME-types. One is easy to load but is really restricted in what it can do to the browser, the other has the run of the system but needs to be downloaded to disk and then explicitly installed using a separate Extension Manager. That way, there's a big perceptual step between doing something relatively harmless and something that could compromise security.
(The extension manager itself could probably be a browser tool. However, for installing extensions system-wide as root under *nix, we'll also need a command-line tool analogous to rpm or dpkg.)
Two things:
First, this article blindly repeats the lie that for artists to get paid, they (or their publishers) need control over distribution. This isn't true; they just need to get paid. Control is one way to do so but there are others. For example, compulsory licenses pay the artists without giving them control over distribution.
(Cory Doctorow does this better than me, here. ObAttribution: This link was stolen from other Slashdot posts.)
Secondly, the article way overstates the importance of big publishers.
I'm convinced that the future lies with the small publishers, the ones that can't afford to pay a decent advance but will do a good job editing and make sure that their books are good. Those publishers will embrace DRM-less ebooks because they have nothing to lose. And someday, one of those DRM-less ebooks will be a huge best-seller, and that'll open the door for reasonable ebooks.
Until then, I'll just use Plucker to read free html ebooks like My Tokyo Death Cult on my Visor.
This is so going to suck. If I get an error message that I'm unfamiliar with I'll plug it into google. Even if the hit is in a language I don't understand I can usually work out what a solution to my problem may be by looking at the command sequences posted in replies.
I don't think this will be a problem. All it means is that you'll only get the English-language hits when you do your search, since the (say) Russian error messages will be posted to Russian-language lists.
Who's with my jingoistic ass?
Dude, that toilet paper is there for a reason.
Getting a mole into Green Hills Software, Microsoft, etc...
Forget moles. You just need a backdoor into their development system. One Outlook worm or IE exploit is all you'd need to install the change. Frankly, I'd be surprised if it hasn't already happened.
At least with F/OSS, there's going to be a huge group of users casually browsing the sources. The odds are good that someone is going to find the trojan, just like there's a good chance that most of the bugs will be found. With proprietary software, there aren't enough people with access to the source.
Besides, F/OSS developers learn to be paranoid about open networks. That's why so many of them use checksums and GPG signatures for downloads and patches. I very much doubt that the developers of proprietary software are going to be that cautious about internal communication, even when there are people using ancient unpatched versions of Outlook Express to read their email on computers that are inside the firewall. They're going to assume that the patch that just got mailed to them has been tested and signed off on by its developer because just because it came from his machine.
This is really easy to stop. For all we talk about campaign contribution and corporate influence, Hatch is still accountable to the people. If you want to kick him out of office, just get the voters mad at him. All the campaign contributions in the world won't get him re-elected if the voters hate him.
And none of the voters like this bill. The only reason he's getting away with it is that most people don't know about it at all. (What? The mainstream media isn't reporting on it? Shocking!)
So get the word out. Write a pamphlet that describes this in a way ordinary (non-geek) folk will find informative (think "VCRs made illegal", not "stifling innovation"), put it online and get people in those areas to print up copies and hand them out door to door.
Be sure to ask the recipients to write to Hatch et., al about this as well. There's nothing like a flood of angry letters to get a politician to back off.
Some of this has already been touched on by other posters, but not quite exactly the way I had it in mind, so...
My idea is to have Firefox examine web-pages as they are loaded and decide, based on the user's previous decisions, whether it should disable certain features before displaying it. More specifically:
(Note: I haven't had a chance to play with any recent Mozilla product in any depth so I don't know how much of what I've described is already there. Apologies if I've partially reinvented the wheel.)
This could be the end of television. Still, I shouldn't get prematurely excited about over this.
There might be a downside.
this could be a good thing. Remember, it was Sony that fought for the VCR..
More importantly, Sony makes more money from selling MP3 players and related hardware than it does from selling records. That's why they've never been overly enthusiastic supporters of the whole DRM bandwagon.
The big question is whether this will still be the case post-merger. If so, they may end up edging toward the business model of using their music division as a way to drive the sale of players.
We can hope, anyway.
IANAL, but I have heard one speak on the subject and according to him, file formats are copyrightable. However, whether or not this is sufficient to prevent third-party implementations of the format has not, as far as I know, been tested. There's apparently a pretty good case for unauthorized implementations not being infringement.
Of course, that doesn't make the SCO argument any less bogus, given that it was released as an open standard. I have no doubt that they'll fail on their claim that they own the standard long before the whole issue of file format copyrightability comes up.
Not only has he changed his product's name to something non-lame but he also managed to get his biggest competitor to pay him to do it!
Y'know, this sort of thing is perfect for open-source hardware projects.
Typically, if a group wants to develop a Cool New Machine, they can do the actual R&D online with CAD software and possibly build a few prototypes. However, once the design is actually done, there's nowhere else to go with it unless they can convince some hardware manufacture that it'll sell enough to justify a production run.
But now, they just need to convert the design to whatever format Pad2Pad uses and put it up for download. Anyone who wants one just needs to send in a copy and a credit card number and they're done.
This could lead to some interesting new hardware.
You can still get it, at least as source code, from here. I still use it and it works reasonably well.
It has a nice, friendly Configure script that'll get it to build on modern Linux systems without any fuss.
The main problems with it are that the Q00L new features are poorly documented, as is how to turn them off, and the that the source code is terrifying. Remember, this was the program that Larry Wall was going to rewrite just before he got distracted by Perl, after which it switched maintainers before finally being (apparently) abandoned.
Still, for all its problems, I haven't found a better news reader. I considered XEmacs GNUS for a while but configuring it is harder to do than just writing your own news reader.