how Gentoo generates heat and passion. If you don't like it, don't use it, period. Why waste outrageous amount of times explaining to the world that it's stupid and that its users are insane? In the time it took you guys who posted that kind of comments, you could have emerge'd and updated a Gentoo box.;-)
Amen to this. I mean, Photoshop is not bad at all - but it's not the only package around either. And it's gotten bloated as hell. The analogy with Windows is interesting. Its success comes from an agressive marketing strategy *and* the fact that many people use cracked versions. Yeppers guys: I'm pretty convinced neither Windows nor Photoshop would be as successful as it is today it they had not been cracked for years. And you'd be surprised how many professional users use cracked software as well. At the very least, it has helped building a solid user base.
That being said, it all depends on what you call "professional users". Photoshop may be intensively used in the journalism world, but is that professional graphics or mere "image tweaking"?... As for people who really make images for images themselves, as in the movies industry, or photography, they use many other software packages. Some of them are not even Windows- nor MacOS-based...
Sometimes I wonder how such "research" projects manage to get funded?;-) The projection device is not even any technological breakthrough. I don't get it.
Yet some parts of Gnome and/or KDE are much more advanced than their Windows counterparts, whether you like it or not. And yes, most Linux GUIs may be lacking in various areas, but there are elements in them that *are* innovative. When I use Gnome, I feel that some items are *much more* advanced than what we have on Windows so far. I didn't say it was ready to compete with Windows on the desktop market - but let's face it, Windows GUI elements are relatively crude compared to KDE, for instance. They are well designed and effective: ok. But not that innovative... I don't see why you would have a problem with "innovative GUI" on Linux, Gnome and KDE have been under heavy development for years and yes, they have had some features that didn't exist on Windows yet. Plus, you're mixing up some things: Gnome, KDE and many window managers are not specifically targeted at Linux and work on Solaris, *BSD, and so on. And many people use professional software packages on such workstations. What's more, Longhorn has clearly borrowed some GUI items from various X-window WMs, like docked areas, plus a general "look and feel". Just look at the Longhorn explorer screenshot, then look at a Gnome Nautilus window...
is how it looks more and more like a Linux Desktop... am I the only one to notice how the Longhorn UI has taken ideas in Gnome, KDE and metacity? (Or is it just my imagination here?)
I agree, and not only that: but as institutions that live on public money, they should promote public research - and OSS is a form of public research in my opinion. It promotes a healthy behavior of the citizens: sharing knowledge, learning, creating, making, and not just for personal money but for the benefit of knowledge itself: the exact point of academia and public research. Therefore, beyond mere cost analysis, OSS *should* be promoted by every public institution. Besides, mixing private and public interests is always bound to yield problems (corruption...)
Ultimately, what do big corporations like MS want? They want the extinction of OSS. Not only is this ridiculous, because it's pretty much the same thing as if you wanted to forbid writers to write books because they used sentences that could be found in other books (the exact same thing to some level, if you think about it), but it's eventually against their own interest too because it tends to reinforce what many institutions have been fighting them for: their monopoly position on the market.
I don't believe Bill Gates is stupid, but is he? MS has gotten in much trouble with courts pretty much all over the world for their commercial strategy and market monopoly, yet they want to kill one form of free competition that lives pretty much everywhere in the world? OSS should actually be seen by MS as a major opportunity to have enough competition around not to be accused of monopoly, yet keep the upper hand in the "commercial products" market, which will probably continue to exist no matter how much OSS grows in the future. So it almosts seems like MS (and others) is asking to get punished. I don't get it. They are going backwards... and that may very well play against them in the future.
you're considered guilty until it's proven that you're innocent? Is that new, because last time I checked, it was supposed to be the other way around. Weird...
All this is nice and well. But it misses a major point in my opinion: when you stop exercising (any activity, not just language), you lose ability. Simple as that. Writing and speaking correctly are a form of exercising. It's a bit as though someone said: "I like to play the guitar with one finger only; after all, it sounds ok to me". And when enough people have lost enough ability to write, society will have to lower its standards to accommodate.
Ok, thanks for the info. I checked on Dell's web site, and I think you're referring to their "Servers, Storage & Networking" products, so I would assume N stands more for "Networking" than for "Naked", but I could be wrong. Some of them are indeed machines sold without OS at low prices. Again, I could be wrong, but as far as I've understood, those machines are targetted as "enterprise products" and I doubt you can buy them as a simple customer. Something to check - but at least, those are not products that the end-user sees when he's looking for a PC, unless he's *really* looking for this kind of OS-less machine.
I agree. It's amazing how a lot of people, even well-educated, intelligent ones, act like young kids when dealing with anything related to computers, and especially related to the internet. And it's not that they don't care about spam, actually a lot of them are very annoyed by it; but the problem, in my opinion, lies in the fact that they don't know the heck where all those e-mails come from, who is behind them, what they are for and most of all, they don't know jack about the basics of e-mail transactions. A bare minimum of technology education seems vital to me if we ever want to be able to "regulate" information exchange on the internet. Really, at some point it's a bit as though you put a car in everybody's hands and let them ride freely even though a lot of them don't have a driving license and don't know anything about driving. It's time we all started being responsible about how we act with our internet connection. Should we force people to get an "internet license"? I don't know, but that's certainly an idea to ponder on, as the internet grows and bad behaviors could lead to huge global problems (this article talks about spam, but it's also true with virus spreading, the rise of spyware/adware on some level, etc.)
Yet how many people went out and bought WindowsXP knowing full well that it included product activation?
At the time of Windows XP shipping, there had been a lot of racket about product activation. It actually made an awful lot of people turn to other OS's when they could do so. Don't forget that most Windows licenses are sold with fully-equipped machines, in other words, people don't have a choice whatsoever, unless they explicitely look into having a choice... which most often means buying more expensive hardware. Yeppers, Windows-equipped computers are often cheaper than OS-less computers. Of course, since the cheapest computers are the ones distributed by the big manufacturers, such as Dell. And such manufacturers don't have any possibility of selling their machines with any other OS than Windows - otherwise they lose their Microsoft agreement. This aggressive commercial strategy is the only way, to me, to make DRM really "work" commercially. Which is another thing to think about when considering DRM... it definitely looks like commercial dictatorship.
As to innovation, you're quite right and it's already happening.
I agree that it's not a decent software distribution practice, but it still sounds simple enough for me. The fact that Adobe is trying to "force" people to use their toolbar is pretty obvious. Then again, there are other ways of producing PDF files than using Acrobat. I'm not sure that toolbar issue justified a whole Slashdot article comparing it to malware and worse.
In other words, copyrights and so forth are the opposite of free market capitalism, just as the monopolies granted by the old monarchies were.
I more or less agree with that point. Although, we *do* need a way to prevent people from plain copying your stuff and make money off of it. At least, if that prevents you from making money yourself. But are copyrights (and mostly, patents!) the right answer? I think that publishing your work (instead of trying to hide it) should be enough to prove anteriority and paternity - and then, a simple "disloyal competition" law could take care of the cases where someone makes more money with your own work than you do.
Well, of course we should refrain from crying about the lost good old times and be glad for what technology has to offer us, but then again I think that most people in here are pretty much tech-oriented, so don't speak too fast when you think they're just old chaps bashing new technology.
Of course unlimited access to information is a wonderful tool. But aren't we getting addicted to it? Like any other form of addiction, it can cause a lot of damage. And it's like we can't stop for one second without any external information - it's like we can't stand being confronted to our self, which is probably becoming dramatically empty in inverse relationship with the amount of external information we deal with.
All in all, this kind of dependency makes us very vulnerable. What when it's not there, what are we gonna do?
Interesting concept. Kinda funny sounding at face value, of course, but it raises an interesting idea: the fairness of any commercial deal and the equal power of both the vendor and the consumer. Clearly, what "disturbs" a lot of people concerning DRM is that the vendor keeps the upper hand. The deal is not fair, not necessarily in terms of value-for-money (after all, it could be seen as a form of long-term rental thing, as someone pointed out), but in terms of power. It is very clear that whoever has the right to "lock" something you buy has more power than you do. Your only power is not to buy it. True, it is a significant power in your hands, but if people choose not to buy stuff, especially cultural stuff, it's the end of not only an industry but of a big part of our cultural life. Until then, and hopefully that won't happen, DRM is a form of commercial dictatorship.
You're missing something: they don't sell any browser, it's free. See my other message. What would they gain from supporting standards is the real question.
Never! Why? Because this is exactly the whole point of its own existence! Since IE is free in itself (ie. comes at no additional cost) and does not particularly promote the Windows platform, the reason is very simple: Microsoft has been pushing IE to sell corporations/developers development and deployment tools that are very pricy - and that specifically target IE as browser.
Microsoft has no incentive to make a fully compliant browser, because then web developers can start using other tools - even free/open tools. The other point is (in my opinion) that Microsoft thinks the more coverage they get with IE, the less people will use other tools, as developers as well as end-users. Thus, it's probably in their agenda to make standards (at least some of them, amongst which CSS 2 might be a good candidate) irrelevant. It's no real secret, Bill Gates has repeatedly said that he didn't care about standards when those were "hindering" Microsoft (pretty much any standard but theirs). But anything you have to comply with is "hindering" you at some point, so that basically means "I don't want to comply".
Slashdot Mirror
how Gentoo generates heat and passion. If you don't like it, don't use it, period. Why waste outrageous amount of times explaining to the world that it's stupid and that its users are insane? In the time it took you guys who posted that kind of comments, you could have emerge'd and updated a Gentoo box. ;-)
Amen to this. I mean, Photoshop is not bad at all - but it's not the only package around either. And it's gotten bloated as hell. The analogy with Windows is interesting. Its success comes from an agressive marketing strategy *and* the fact that many people use cracked versions. Yeppers guys: I'm pretty convinced neither Windows nor Photoshop would be as successful as it is today it they had not been cracked for years. And you'd be surprised how many professional users use cracked software as well. At the very least, it has helped building a solid user base.
That being said, it all depends on what you call "professional users". Photoshop may be intensively used in the journalism world, but is that professional graphics or mere "image tweaking"?... As for people who really make images for images themselves, as in the movies industry, or photography, they use many other software packages. Some of them are not even Windows- nor MacOS-based...
Sometimes I wonder how such "research" projects manage to get funded? ;-) The projection device is not even any technological breakthrough. I don't get it.
Yet some parts of Gnome and/or KDE are much more advanced than their Windows counterparts, whether you like it or not. And yes, most Linux GUIs may be lacking in various areas, but there are elements in them that *are* innovative. When I use Gnome, I feel that some items are *much more* advanced than what we have on Windows so far. I didn't say it was ready to compete with Windows on the desktop market - but let's face it, Windows GUI elements are relatively crude compared to KDE, for instance. They are well designed and effective: ok. But not that innovative... I don't see why you would have a problem with "innovative GUI" on Linux, Gnome and KDE have been under heavy development for years and yes, they have had some features that didn't exist on Windows yet. Plus, you're mixing up some things: Gnome, KDE and many window managers are not specifically targeted at Linux and work on Solaris, *BSD, and so on. And many people use professional software packages on such workstations. What's more, Longhorn has clearly borrowed some GUI items from various X-window WMs, like docked areas, plus a general "look and feel". Just look at the Longhorn explorer screenshot, then look at a Gnome Nautilus window...
Easier to force people to upgrade than to optimize code...
and start developing? :D
is how it looks more and more like a Linux Desktop... am I the only one to notice how the Longhorn UI has taken ideas in Gnome, KDE and metacity? (Or is it just my imagination here?)
I agree, and not only that: but as institutions that live on public money, they should promote public research - and OSS is a form of public research in my opinion. It promotes a healthy behavior of the citizens: sharing knowledge, learning, creating, making, and not just for personal money but for the benefit of knowledge itself: the exact point of academia and public research. Therefore, beyond mere cost analysis, OSS *should* be promoted by every public institution. Besides, mixing private and public interests is always bound to yield problems (corruption...)
Ultimately, what do big corporations like MS want? They want the extinction of OSS. Not only is this ridiculous, because it's pretty much the same thing as if you wanted to forbid writers to write books because they used sentences that could be found in other books (the exact same thing to some level, if you think about it), but it's eventually against their own interest too because it tends to reinforce what many institutions have been fighting them for: their monopoly position on the market.
I don't believe Bill Gates is stupid, but is he? MS has gotten in much trouble with courts pretty much all over the world for their commercial strategy and market monopoly, yet they want to kill one form of free competition that lives pretty much everywhere in the world? OSS should actually be seen by MS as a major opportunity to have enough competition around not to be accused of monopoly, yet keep the upper hand in the "commercial products" market, which will probably continue to exist no matter how much OSS grows in the future. So it almosts seems like MS (and others) is asking to get punished. I don't get it. They are going backwards... and that may very well play against them in the future.
you're considered guilty until it's proven that you're innocent? Is that new, because last time I checked, it was supposed to be the other way around. Weird...
Was that supposed to be funny? Let's hear you speak swedish...
And you know what, when I see projects like this flourishing, it just makes me think there is hope for a better world. ;-)
All this is nice and well. But it misses a major point in my opinion: when you stop exercising (any activity, not just language), you lose ability. Simple as that. Writing and speaking correctly are a form of exercising. It's a bit as though someone said: "I like to play the guitar with one finger only; after all, it sounds ok to me". And when enough people have lost enough ability to write, society will have to lower its standards to accommodate.
Ok, thanks for the info. I checked on Dell's web site, and I think you're referring to their "Servers, Storage & Networking" products, so I would assume N stands more for "Networking" than for "Naked", but I could be wrong. Some of them are indeed machines sold without OS at low prices. Again, I could be wrong, but as far as I've understood, those machines are targetted as "enterprise products" and I doubt you can buy them as a simple customer. Something to check - but at least, those are not products that the end-user sees when he's looking for a PC, unless he's *really* looking for this kind of OS-less machine.
I agree. It's amazing how a lot of people, even well-educated, intelligent ones, act like young kids when dealing with anything related to computers, and especially related to the internet. And it's not that they don't care about spam, actually a lot of them are very annoyed by it; but the problem, in my opinion, lies in the fact that they don't know the heck where all those e-mails come from, who is behind them, what they are for and most of all, they don't know jack about the basics of e-mail transactions. A bare minimum of technology education seems vital to me if we ever want to be able to "regulate" information exchange on the internet. Really, at some point it's a bit as though you put a car in everybody's hands and let them ride freely even though a lot of them don't have a driving license and don't know anything about driving. It's time we all started being responsible about how we act with our internet connection. Should we force people to get an "internet license"? I don't know, but that's certainly an idea to ponder on, as the internet grows and bad behaviors could lead to huge global problems (this article talks about spam, but it's also true with virus spreading, the rise of spyware/adware on some level, etc.)
At the time of Windows XP shipping, there had been a lot of racket about product activation. It actually made an awful lot of people turn to other OS's when they could do so. Don't forget that most Windows licenses are sold with fully-equipped machines, in other words, people don't have a choice whatsoever, unless they explicitely look into having a choice... which most often means buying more expensive hardware. Yeppers, Windows-equipped computers are often cheaper than OS-less computers. Of course, since the cheapest computers are the ones distributed by the big manufacturers, such as Dell. And such manufacturers don't have any possibility of selling their machines with any other OS than Windows - otherwise they lose their Microsoft agreement. This aggressive commercial strategy is the only way, to me, to make DRM really "work" commercially. Which is another thing to think about when considering DRM... it definitely looks like commercial dictatorship.
As to innovation, you're quite right and it's already happening.
I agree that it's not a decent software distribution practice, but it still sounds simple enough for me. The fact that Adobe is trying to "force" people to use their toolbar is pretty obvious. Then again, there are other ways of producing PDF files than using Acrobat. I'm not sure that toolbar issue justified a whole Slashdot article comparing it to malware and worse.
I more or less agree with that point. Although, we *do* need a way to prevent people from plain copying your stuff and make money off of it. At least, if that prevents you from making money yourself. But are copyrights (and mostly, patents!) the right answer? I think that publishing your work (instead of trying to hide it) should be enough to prove anteriority and paternity - and then, a simple "disloyal competition" law could take care of the cases where someone makes more money with your own work than you do.
Uh, then just uninstall Acrobat and re-install it without the toolbar. 1 minute later, you're all set.
Well, of course we should refrain from crying about the lost good old times and be glad for what technology has to offer us, but then again I think that most people in here are pretty much tech-oriented, so don't speak too fast when you think they're just old chaps bashing new technology.
Of course unlimited access to information is a wonderful tool. But aren't we getting addicted to it? Like any other form of addiction, it can cause a lot of damage. And it's like we can't stop for one second without any external information - it's like we can't stand being confronted to our self, which is probably becoming dramatically empty in inverse relationship with the amount of external information we deal with.
All in all, this kind of dependency makes us very vulnerable. What when it's not there, what are we gonna do?
Interesting concept. Kinda funny sounding at face value, of course, but it raises an interesting idea: the fairness of any commercial deal and the equal power of both the vendor and the consumer. Clearly, what "disturbs" a lot of people concerning DRM is that the vendor keeps the upper hand. The deal is not fair, not necessarily in terms of value-for-money (after all, it could be seen as a form of long-term rental thing, as someone pointed out), but in terms of power. It is very clear that whoever has the right to "lock" something you buy has more power than you do. Your only power is not to buy it. True, it is a significant power in your hands, but if people choose not to buy stuff, especially cultural stuff, it's the end of not only an industry but of a big part of our cultural life. Until then, and hopefully that won't happen, DRM is a form of commercial dictatorship.
Public research should be openly published at all times. That's the very idea of public research.
You're missing something: they don't sell any browser, it's free. See my other message. What would they gain from supporting standards is the real question.
What's wrong with a Merlin? :P
Never! Why? Because this is exactly the whole point of its own existence! Since IE is free in itself (ie. comes at no additional cost) and does not particularly promote the Windows platform, the reason is very simple: Microsoft has been pushing IE to sell corporations/developers development and deployment tools that are very pricy - and that specifically target IE as browser.
Microsoft has no incentive to make a fully compliant browser, because then web developers can start using other tools - even free/open tools. The other point is (in my opinion) that Microsoft thinks the more coverage they get with IE, the less people will use other tools, as developers as well as end-users. Thus, it's probably in their agenda to make standards (at least some of them, amongst which CSS 2 might be a good candidate) irrelevant. It's no real secret, Bill Gates has repeatedly said that he didn't care about standards when those were "hindering" Microsoft (pretty much any standard but theirs). But anything you have to comply with is "hindering" you at some point, so that basically means "I don't want to comply".