You were not supporting a Java server application, but an EJB application, and EJB introduces two factors that are not inherent in general Java server applications:
1) They are potentially distributed, so overall system topology can vary considerably between customer sites. This is a problem that occurs with any distributed technology, and is not specific to EJBs.
2) Application server vendors have tried to "lock users in" by using incompatible deployment descriptors, proprietary libraries, and various other "it's more work to port than recommend our system" strategies. Some of the blame for this can be laid at Sun's door because the EJB 1 and 2 specifications let vendors get away with this sort of crap, but EJB 3 removes deployment descriptors, and therefore one major source of headaches. However, until support for it percolates through the vendor base (which will take time, especially with WebSphere, if history is anything to go by), we'll be living with EJB 2 for some time yet:-(
Standard Java server apps that don't use EJBs and aren't distributed shouldn't require any more custom support and maintenance than those written in other languages.
"Right, because there was no violent crime before some deranged knucklehead invented firearms."
Yes, the halcyon days before firearms, when one could walk the roads of Europe without fear of being assailed by gangs of bandits who rob and kill travelers, and people like the Romans, Mongols, and Crusaders were incapable of slaughtering the populations of entire cities because they didn't have guns to shoot them with. Serfs gamboled happily about, safe in the knowledge that the big group of fierce looking be-horsed chaps in steel lingerie have no guns, and can therefore be seen off by a couple of determined fellows waving pointed wooden seed-hole makers. Take that, you metal-clad scallywag, and please refrain from waving sharp things at me and shouting, or I'll be forced to use the pointed part of my stick, and give you a thrashing your grandchildren will have nightmares about...
The "Jack was a noble/prince/insert important societal position" idea has been kicking around for years, but certain pieces of evidence refute it. Such people had for example received expensive educations, yet the two known pieces of Jack's written material indicate that he was at best semi-literate. And while today's media-rich society would perhaps allow a noble to emulate the style of a semi-literate person, this was not true of the 19th century Britain, where the top echelons of society spent nearly all of their lives with those of a similar station to their own, and therefore had little if any idea of the way those less fortunate than themselves lived, spoke, or wrote.
"I assume you are talking about win32, as it's the only major OS that isn't basically Unix. However even then, as I understand it, it is possible to write applications as co-operating services "
Win32 is actually a fairly feature-rich environment for writing applications that use cooperating processes, so it's quite surprising that most seem opt for threading even in scenarios where a multiple process approach would be more appropriate.
"Which really blows away that whole artist/work of art theory. What artist sells their "art" so cheaply?"
Artists have been selling their works cheaply or even giving them away for centuries, so why should things be different now?
"All these "artists" have sold their souls to the devil, and they did it with dollar signs in their eyes, and buxom young things squirming in their beds."
There are other reasons than money or sex that may motivate an artist to sign what almost always turns out to be a rotten contract, e.g:
1) They want to spend all their time with music instead of flipping burgers for most of it. 2) It offers a chance to reach a wide audience. 3) A recording contract with a major company is hard to obtain, and having one is therefore still an indication of being notably successful at one's chosen career.
"Copying music hurts the artist like stealing bales of cotton would have hurt the house slave, back in the plantation days."
This sounds like self-justification rather than an observation, just as some thieves (and no, I am not saying copyright violation is theft, or equivalent to theft -- it is simply an analogy much like your slavery analogy!) justify their acts by saying that they actually generate wealth by fueling an entire sector of the insurance industry.
Because a lot of them are stuck in contracts that they can't get out of, and even when they can by choosing not to renew after N years, the company they were contracted to still ends up owning all the work they did during that period.
"Mac OS X has terrible hardware support: it only runs on Macintosh computers."
Whilst this is true, the same can be said about the majority of operating systems throughout computing history, which were written to run on one family of computers from a single manufacturer. Generic systems such as Linux and Windows are the exception, not the rule, and this trend continues today, because by far the majority of microprocessors are located in embedded systems that run very specialised software which is useless on anything else, even though the same CPU may be found in a wide variety of such devices.
"The problem here is that Linux's hardware support is so good (when compared to e.g. Mac OS X) that people have come to expect that it will support every piece of hardware is existance,"
I don't think most people actually think in that way at all. What they expect Linux to do is support _their_ hardware "out of the box" as it were, without them having to know anything about it beyond what's printed on the front of the machine (i.e. manufacturer and model) -- how it does this has no more relevance than how their TV lets them watch the latest episode of "House".
"but that will never happen until hardware manufacturers start using standardized interfaces for everything (and even then, there will still be people using "obsolete" hardware)."
Unfortunately, there won't be any reason for them to do so unless Linux can increase its market share on the desktop. The fact that there is a growing dissatisfaction with Windows among the general user community is obvious, but it seems to be translating into Mac wins rather than ones for desktop Linux, and I'm not basing the "Mac win" thing on figures from market research groups here, but on the fact that many generic PC peripherals on sale at cash-and-carry outlets now have "Mac OS X compatible" stickers on their boxes, while equivalent peripherals from the same manufacturers only listed their Windows version requirements a little over a year ago.
"Despite what the zealots claim, Linux is not for everyone. No software is."
Computers aren't for everyone either, despite what vendors and salesmen sometimes claim.
"If you want to run Linux, then you can expect that its hardware requirements will differ from those of your particular version of Windows. However, the impact of that is, in my experience, overstated, since once you've decided to run Linux, your future hardware purchases will be made with Linux in mind---and it really doesn't matter if Linux doesn't support hardware that you don't have anyway."
This is true of geeks, and nobody else. There are hundreds of millions of desktop and laptop computers (with laptops now being the preferred choice) being used all over the world, and the vast majority of them will never be seen by anyone who has the faintest idea of what's actually in them. This is commodity technology that people buy in the same way they buy cars, mobile phones, stereo systems, and all the other highly complex black boxes that they own and use on a daily basis without even thinking about what's actually going on inside. They could be sold on Linux as "this thing you can put on your computer that will make viruses and other stuff go away", but will lose interest the moment people start talking about graphics chip sets and other technical details they have no interest in -- for most people, it either works on what they have, or it doesn't, and in the latter case, any interest they may have shown will evapourate.
"missing features in trial software isn't all that unheard of. Think of it as a free trial with wireless networking disabled."
The original poster already covered this in one of his replies. Like most of today's computer owners, getting online is the major reason for using one, so a trial version of an OS he can't do that with is of no real use to him. Obviously, this isn't the case with everyone, but I'd be willing to bet quite a lot of money that at least 80% of those who are in the position to tr
"The reason iPod doesn't have FLAC is simple - it wasn't made by Apple and it doesn't have DRM.".
Apple must therefore have designed MP3, AIFF, and WAV formats too then, together with their subtle but effective COAPWYL ("Copy Onto Anything, Play Whenever You Like") DRM schemes.
Yeah. it's like having MS lean on your three-man software company by buying it for a few million greenies. Oh, woe is me, Micro$soft have used anti-competitive tactics on my poor little company, I'll now have to spend time crying into my cocktail on a beach in Barbados instead of writing C++ and answering phones. Ba$tards!
"It's completely obvious and logical that a very limited piece of "trial software" is usually(!) much easier to get accustomed to than a full-blown, entirely new environment with entirely new features and capabilities. Nothing to see here, move along."
Read my original post again, because I said nothing about getting used to anything. I was replying to somebody who stated that another poster should solve his problems with _trying out Linux_ by going out and buying a different piece of hardware. Everything I have said was in that context, which you would know if you had actually read my (rather short) post instead of throwing a hissy-fit over one phrase deliberately taken out of context.
"Or, pray tell me: have you managed to grasp *all* of Windows' features, quirks and maintenance issues in 45 minutes instead of >= 10 years?"
Why do you assume I'm using Windows? I never stated that I was using any particular OS, so you are making completely unwarranted assumptions, as indeed seems to be your wont.
"Too many people all too easily forget that they have more than 10 years of experience with Windows-based systems and specific software there, but somehow always assume that checking out Linux should magically make everything work in a couple of hours..."
Which has nothing whatsoever to do with whether a user should be told to go out and buy different hardware. The original poster did not expect to know all about Linux by any magic, all he asked was that it work with his computer so he could try it out, and it would not.
"((IOW they're DEAD WRONG about judging platforms, but often don't know it)"
Just like you're dead wrong about the topic being discussed. IMO their ignorance is more understandable than yours, as all you had to do WAS READ A VERY SHORT POST.
"Sure, probably people don't care about Linux e.g. because with XP they now have a moderately well-working system"
With the original poster, it was a case of a working XP system versus a non.working Linux one. And he did care enough about Linux to want to test it, but Linux didn't allow him to do that.
"but that still doesn't change one iota the fact that your comparison comment was bunk"
When taken out of context like you did, it certainly was. In its context, it was however entirely appropriate. But then tilting at straw men seems to be preferable for you than actually making a useful contribution to what was being discussed.
" I did properly answer your comment anyway (it's absolutely not comparable, much higher functionality/scope than a single piece of software etc.)."
You did not answer it in the context of what I originally wrote, i.e. as regards telling somebody to go out and buy different hardware to make Linux work so that _they can see what it's like_. Your entire set of posts are simply responses to straw men of your own making, not the points that were being made. When you have an answer that's appropriate, then post it, but don't bother setting up any more straw men, as they only make your arguments look weak.
"This is Linux, it's a WHOLE OPERATING SYSTEM WORLD with TENS OF GIGABYTES/THOUSANDS of freely available software packages and a certain amount of complexity that goes with such a hugely large offer, not your lame friggin' small trial/freeware text editor or photo management tool which has not the slightest amount of system requirements or dependencies on hardware device compatibility etc.."
And what value has any of this for someone whose hardware cannot be used with the base OS, especially when a good many of those open source applications (in fact, the majority of those that anybody actually uses) can also be run on commercial operating systems that do work with their hardware? So I will ask again, because for all the stated dumbness of my remark, you've still not answered it: from an end-user POV, what is so special about Linux that they should spend more time, effort, and money on it than any other piece of trial software?
"If people *really* thought of how stupid some Windows behaviour/risk is" blah, blah, open source, blah, blah, rinse, lather, repeat, ad infinitum. Get it into that tiny fragment of brain lodged somewhere in your skull: these arguments have been used for years, and nobody cares about them except _people who are already using Linux_. If you all stopped making excuses and blaming everyone else for the fact that you can't even give away what others are charging quite a lot for, then things might change for the better, but some of us have been waiting since Slackware was the only complete distro, and it still hasn't happened.
"Nobody cares about Ogg my ass! Plenty of "normal" people use it"
In the same way they use AAC, WMA, or for that matter.DOC and.PPC files, i.e. without knowing or caring what it is because the OS combined with applications programs manages everything for them automatically. If you don't think that this is the case, then try asking a random iPod owner what the difference between AAC and MP4 is, or someone who uses Outlook everyday in their job about PPC files, what they're used for, and where Windows keeps them.
"more and more video games are starting to use Vorbis"
And games are written by -- yes, you've guessed it: PROGRAMMERS. Question of the day: what is the overall percentage of the computer-using public that develops games? How many of the people at whom such games are targeted know or care that Vorbis is being used? How many give a hoot about any of a game's file formats? In the sort of statistics that the company marketing a game will use for market research, all of these figures are close enough to zero that they will be lost in the error factor of their sampling methods, hence the fact that ads for games don't tend to harp on at length about what formats are used for each type of file.
The reality of of the matter is quite simply that people are largely oblivious of file formats in general, and not Ogg-Vorbis in particular, thus Windows' default view not showing file suffixes, but putting a little icon next to entries telling people what they're used for (music, video, WP document, etc.), together with any relevant metadata that describes them, and Apple using a similar system both in OS X and the iXXX apps which ship with it. People watch TV without knowing or caring about how the transmitter encodes sound, video, and colour information, and listen to FM radio without worrying about how the two stereo channels are encoded, so the fact that they also listen to music on their computers and portable players without even thinking about how the particular bit patterns that get turned into sound happen to be organised isn't particularly surprising.
And from his viewpoint that's precisely what it's worth. Sadly for desktop Linux, the vast majority of computer owners feel the same way.
"You can afford to get a new wireless card that works with said software"
As he already said, he simply wanted to try Linux out, so why should he have to spend money on different hardware to do so? What's so special about linux from an and-user POV that they should expend more time, effort, and money on it than any other piece of free trial software?
"mp3 players are usb mass storage and require no software...."
MP3 is a file format that has nothing to do with USB, and doesn't require a computer as an intermediate link. A system that used pre-recorded cassettes with MP3 files on them would be an MP3 player because it was _playing MP3 files_ -- that's what defines an MP3 player, not USB or any other interface. iPods are clearly capable of _playing MP3 files_, so this by definition makes them MP3 players.
"retards buy retarded devices i guess"
Retards also make stupid statements about MP3 players being something other than things that play MP3 files.
There were a number of other factors that helped Borland kill themselves besides the OWL-1 to OWL-II debacle:
1) Tools like Turbo-Assembler, which had previously been bundled with Borland C++, started to be sold separately instead, as had always been the case with Microsoft. This lowered the perceived value of the system in relation to its competitors.
2) Their compiler's code quality began to fall behind that of other vendors. This culminated in Borland C++ 5.X shipping with Intel's compiler in addition to Borland's, with them advising programmers to use theirs when fast compilation was required, but Intel's if there was a need for performance, thereby admitting that their own compiler was only really suitable for prototyping, not shipping commercial-quality software.
3) The long-awaited fully 32-bit Borland C++ 5 was so buggy as to be largely unusable in a practical sense. This was particularly noticeable in the project manager, which crashed so frequently that the IDE was relegated to being little more than a glorified text editor. A lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued, yet Borland took an inordinate amount of time to fix the various issues, which more or less forced people to look around for other options.
4) Loyalists who hung around for the promised "RAD C++ with Delphi-like productivity" were rewarded for their loyalty with what was effectively Delphi with a C++ compiler gaffer-taped to it via some proprietary extensions that weren't present in the Intel compiler which had shipped with BC++ 5, thereby forcing people to use the by now rather sad Borland compiler for shipping applications. It wasn't what customers either wanted or expected, and therefore generated lack-lustre sales which actually fell year-on-year as people realised that this was to be a permanent state of affairs, and not, as some initially thought, merely a stop-gap product that would eventually be replaced by a full C++ class library that didn't rely on weird extensions nobody else could be bothered to implement.
I won't even go into the various marketing missteps they made subsequent to Borland C++ 5, except to mention the fact that they managed to completely alienate virtually their entire traditional small business and individual programmer market by effectively saying "sod off, we're only interested in big corporate accounts, not pissy little quantities that dweebs buy".
So rather than committing seppuku in one go, Borland's case was actually one of deliberately submitting themselves to death by a thousand small cuts.
"Maybe I wasn't clear, so I'll try again... Standard notation records pitch, tablature records position."
You were perfectly clear the first time -- reiterating a wrong statement does not make it right.
"This is correct, but that doesn't mean fingering and transposition are the same thing. Transposing is another one of those things a musician is expected to know how to do -- and depending on your focus, you may be expected to memorize the natural key and range of every instrument in an orchestra. Regardless of where concert C is, the notes still represent a pitch. Fingering is a different story."
A transposing instrument is not one whose player has to mentally transpose things, but one whose score is transposed into a different key from the one played by C pitched instruments. Consider for example a work whose true key is C major: those playing Bb instruments will read from a score written in D, Eb instruments from one in A (they usualy, but not always, score these down rather than up because the Eb family tends to be high-pitched), and A instruments will have a score written in C#. This score transposition is intended to ensure that the player can use the same fingering for each instrument in a particular family, so a clarinet player who is has to switch between a Bb clarinet and an A clarinet in a particular piece of music (because each instrument has a distinct tone) will have this reflected by a score whose key changes (assuming again a C major piece) from D to C#, thus allowing him or her to use exactly the same finger positions on both instruments to produce what in actual pitch terms is C major scale.
"I really hope the keyboard tab thing is a mistake. Piano is probably the most important instrument for a musician to learn, and playing from tabs is hardly learning. I can't even imagine how you would notate something like this in tab -- the closest I've seen is the piano roll."
Keyboard tab is a little picture of a small part of a keyboard with black dots on various keys to represent chords. The only place I've seen it used is as a teaching aid in books showing how to play things such as modal Jazz, where chords such as 9ths and 13ths are commonly used; it tends to sit under a piano score rather than taking the place of one, and helps students cope with the fact that Modal Jazz is one of those forms that looks very horrible indeed when written out because (a) it tends to be harmonically, melodically, and rhythmically complex, and (b) the use of a 9 note diminished scale means that key signatures have no real meaning.
"standard notation is, strictly speaking, pitch. Here's why: if a trumpet player hands me a score for trumpet, I can play it on guitar from the sheet music, even though I have no idea how the trumpet is fingered."
But you won't be playing the same notes when reading that score, because you will play a C when reading a C, while your trumpet player will play a Bb or Eb, depending on the instrument, when reading the same note. One or the other will therefore have to actually play in a different key from what is written, thereby proving that written notes do not represent pitch any more than guitar or keyboard tab does.
"If that work was written in tab, however, my horn player can't"
That's merely due to the fact that he hasn't learned to read it, not because it would be impossible for him to do so. In my previous career as a session keyboard player, I had to read guitar tab as a matter of necessity, and can therefore play from it just as easily as any other form of commonly accepted notation (I also learned to read guitarist's finger positions on a fret-board as a consequence, which turned out to be very useful indeed!). My ability to read guitar tab obviously isn't a case of positional information, because a keyboard has no positional equivalence to a guitar, so in my case it is purely a form of notation that I used to play notes with, as is the case with standard notation.
"Most people think Windows XP Home Edition costs less than $100. In fact, that's the price of the upgrade only. The full version costs $200. Similarly, the full Proffesional Edition"
Wow, you're right. And MS were surprised that they didn't sell as many boxed editions as they thought? At that price, the only surprising thing is that they sold any! BTW, a quick cruise around various web sites reveals that it's even more expensive in many other countries, so MS shouldn't act so shocked when people pirate it, especially when the hardware it runs on can be had so cheaply nowadays.
"Similarly, the full Proffesional Edition cost more than most people think."
Yes, but it's a relative bargain at only $100 more than the cruddy Home Edition. I can't imagine why anybody would bother paying $199 for that when they can have Pro for an extra $100.
"In order to legaly put Windows on your Mac, you're going to need the full version of one of these products."
Indeed. The upgrade no doubt checks for the presence of a qualifying MS product, and these can't be installed on a Mac even if you happen to have a CD of (for example) Win98 lying around. Furthermore, the Mac's insistence on a version of XP with SP2 means that most of the older sealed boxed sets or OEM versions being sold on Amazon and EBay for well under $100 can't be used either.
"If Microsoft has significan't better pricing with Vista than with XP, this will be cheaper"
I doubt that this will be the case, as the full version of Windows-98 was pretty much the same price as XP Home, so it's likely that they'll continue this with Vista, although the Home Basic edition may be a little cheaper due to the fact that it has even less features than XP Home. Or rather, one can hope that this might be the case!
It is very probable that the low-end Dells will ship with the Home Basic edition of Vista, which won't cost anything near $200 (MS may do some stupid things, but they aren't suicidal enough to charge the same price for a crippled "idiots only" version of Vista as they now do for XP Professional!).
"From my understanding, once you change a couple of "riffs" in the song, it becomes a different song and therefore is not subject to copyright."
Your understanding is wrong. A plaintiff will win in court if a song has certain specific similarities to his or her original -- it does not have to be identical. If changing a couple of riffs here and there was enough, jazz players (and more importantly, their recording / publishing companies) would not have attributed their often substantially altered renditions of various works to the original authors.
"It's major advantage is that it records pitch, not position."
This is completely wrong. A large class of blown instruments (i.e. most woodwinds and brass) are termed "transposing instruments" because what is written as a "C" comes out as Bb, A, or Eb (depending on the particular instrument). Transposing the score to an instrument's "natural key" in this way allows a clarinet player for example to use the same fingering on instruments pitched at A. Bb, C, and Eb, whereas having them work with a score where a written middle C would equate to the key a piano player calls "middle C" would require them to learn completely separate sets of fingering for each differently pitched instrument.
Standard notation is thus every bit as positional as guitar or keyboard tab, because both contain a set of instructions telling musicians to make various physical movements that will produce a certain pitch, and not a representation of the pitch itself.
They haven't had anything like as much luck killing entrenched hardware, though. Nintendo and Sony are sill in the console business, 90% of mobile phones use a non-MS OS despite several years of marketing campaigns, few set-top boxes run MS software, and they only won the PDA OS market after it had been made obsolete by other technology, and thus became not only irrelevant, but also virtually non-existent as a source of income.
Like many monopolies, Microsoft do not do particularly well in areas where their products are forced to compete on their merits.
OK, fair enough. It is though a shame from a historic viewpoint that IBM didn't use a 68000 instead of the 8086 family, which were by far the worst of the 16-bit batch in terms of both performance and architecture. Anybody who had to program in the "bad old days" of DOS will remember various horrid hardware and software hacks that were used to try and get around the limitations imposed by a 1MB address space whose top 360K was directly mapped to hardware, and an architecture which divided that limited space into 64K chunks. Those who also programmed on the Mac, Amiga, or Atari ST will also remember how wonderful it felt to work with a CPU that was not only free from those limitations, but also had a largely orthogonal instruction set that had been designed instead of feeling like something cobbled together with bits left over from the 8080 project.
Some of those who are too young to remember the days before IBM launched their PC may think that it had some sort of technical merit which allowed it to smash the competition, yet the fact of the matter is that it was actually slower than most 8 bit systems, had notably inferior graphics and sound capabilities to home computers that cost a fifth as much, and was totally smashed in every respect by any of the 68000-based computers that were launched more or less concurrently with it. Of course, this was quite usual with IBM kit of all sizes, which had constantly been outstripped both technically and on price by competitors, yet still managed to gain and hold 90% of the entire computing industry until the end of the 1980s. The IBM PC could therefore have used a 4004 and still become the dominant platform, because the executives who gave large sums of money to IBM never had to use computers themselves, and therefore didn't care about details like technical specifications, which they didn't understand anyway: if the IBM salesman said it would do what they wanted, then it would be bought, and using it then became Somebody Else's Problem.
"I doubt IBM would have selected it even had it been available because of second source issues."
There were actually less second source issues than was the case with the 8088, because the Z8000 was made by Zilog, Hitachi, and AMD (I know of these ones, but there may have been others as well). IBM could also have licensed it quite easily and manufactured it themselves if they'd wanted to, but it wasn't available in commercial quantities when they were designing the original PC, and even if it had been, no version with an 8-bit data bus existed because Zilog didn't reckon that anybody would want a 16-bit CPU that wasn't a 16-bit CPU!
"Besides the technical reasons I wonder if IBM had problems dealing with Motorola in other ways."
I'm confused now: AFAIK Motorola didn't sell the Z8000.
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You were not supporting a Java server application, but an EJB application, and EJB introduces two factors that are not inherent in general Java server applications:
:-(
1) They are potentially distributed, so overall system topology can vary considerably between customer sites. This is a problem that occurs with any distributed technology, and is not specific to EJBs.
2) Application server vendors have tried to "lock users in" by using incompatible deployment descriptors, proprietary libraries, and various other "it's more work to port than recommend our system" strategies. Some of the blame for this can be laid at Sun's door because the EJB 1 and 2 specifications let vendors get away with this sort of crap, but EJB 3 removes deployment descriptors, and therefore one major source of headaches. However, until support for it percolates through the vendor base (which will take time, especially with WebSphere, if history is anything to go by), we'll be living with EJB 2 for some time yet
Standard Java server apps that don't use EJBs and aren't distributed shouldn't require any more custom support and maintenance than those written in other languages.
"Right, because there was no violent crime before some deranged knucklehead invented firearms."
Yes, the halcyon days before firearms, when one could walk the roads of Europe without fear of being assailed by gangs of bandits who rob and kill travelers, and people like the Romans, Mongols, and Crusaders were incapable of slaughtering the populations of entire cities because they didn't have guns to shoot them with. Serfs gamboled happily about, safe in the knowledge that the big group of fierce looking be-horsed chaps in steel lingerie have no guns, and can therefore be seen off by a couple of determined fellows waving pointed wooden seed-hole makers. Take that, you metal-clad scallywag, and please refrain from waving sharp things at me and shouting, or I'll be forced to use the pointed part of my stick, and give you a thrashing your grandchildren will have nightmares about...
The "Jack was a noble/prince/insert important societal position" idea has been kicking around for years, but certain pieces of evidence refute it. Such people had for example received expensive educations, yet the two known pieces of Jack's written material indicate that he was at best semi-literate. And while today's media-rich society would perhaps allow a noble to emulate the style of a semi-literate person, this was not true of the 19th century Britain, where the top echelons of society spent nearly all of their lives with those of a similar station to their own, and therefore had little if any idea of the way those less fortunate than themselves lived, spoke, or wrote.
"I assume you are talking about win32, as it's the only major OS that isn't basically Unix. However even then, as I understand it, it is possible to write applications as co-operating services "
Win32 is actually a fairly feature-rich environment for writing applications that use cooperating processes, so it's quite surprising that most seem opt for threading even in scenarios where a multiple process approach would be more appropriate.
"Which really blows away that whole artist/work of art theory. What artist sells their "art" so cheaply?"
Artists have been selling their works cheaply or even giving them away for centuries, so why should things be different now?
"All these "artists" have sold their souls to the devil, and they did it with dollar signs in their eyes, and buxom young things squirming in their beds."
There are other reasons than money or sex that may motivate an artist to sign what almost always turns out to be a rotten contract, e.g:
1) They want to spend all their time with music instead of flipping burgers for most of it.
2) It offers a chance to reach a wide audience.
3) A recording contract with a major company is hard to obtain, and having one is therefore still an indication of being notably successful at one's chosen career.
"Copying music hurts the artist like stealing bales of cotton would have hurt the house slave, back in the plantation days."
This sounds like self-justification rather than an observation, just as some thieves (and no, I am not saying copyright violation is theft, or equivalent to theft -- it is simply an analogy much like your slavery analogy!) justify their acts by saying that they actually generate wealth by fueling an entire sector of the insurance industry.
Because a lot of them are stuck in contracts that they can't get out of, and even when they can by choosing not to renew after N years, the company they were contracted to still ends up owning all the work they did during that period.
"Mac OS X has terrible hardware support: it only runs on Macintosh computers."
Whilst this is true, the same can be said about the majority of operating systems throughout computing history, which were written to run on one family of computers from a single manufacturer. Generic systems such as Linux and Windows are the exception, not the rule, and this trend continues today, because by far the majority of microprocessors are located in embedded systems that run very specialised software which is useless on anything else, even though the same CPU may be found in a wide variety of such devices.
"The problem here is that Linux's hardware support is so good (when compared to e.g. Mac OS X) that people have come to expect that it will support every piece of hardware is existance,"
I don't think most people actually think in that way at all. What they expect Linux to do is support _their_ hardware "out of the box" as it were, without them having to know anything about it beyond what's printed on the front of the machine (i.e. manufacturer and model) -- how it does this has no more relevance than how their TV lets them watch the latest episode of "House".
"but that will never happen until hardware manufacturers start using standardized interfaces for everything (and even then, there will still be people using "obsolete" hardware)."
Unfortunately, there won't be any reason for them to do so unless Linux can increase its market share on the desktop. The fact that there is a growing dissatisfaction with Windows among the general user community is obvious, but it seems to be translating into Mac wins rather than ones for desktop Linux, and I'm not basing the "Mac win" thing on figures from market research groups here, but on the fact that many generic PC peripherals on sale at cash-and-carry outlets now have "Mac OS X compatible" stickers on their boxes, while equivalent peripherals from the same manufacturers only listed their Windows version requirements a little over a year ago.
"Despite what the zealots claim, Linux is not for everyone. No software is."
Computers aren't for everyone either, despite what vendors and salesmen sometimes claim.
"If you want to run Linux, then you can expect that its hardware requirements will differ from those of your particular version of Windows. However, the impact of that is, in my experience, overstated, since once you've decided to run Linux, your future hardware purchases will be made with Linux in mind---and it really doesn't matter if Linux doesn't support hardware that you don't have anyway."
This is true of geeks, and nobody else. There are hundreds of millions of desktop and laptop computers (with laptops now being the preferred choice) being used all over the world, and the vast majority of them will never be seen by anyone who has the faintest idea of what's actually in them. This is commodity technology that people buy in the same way they buy cars, mobile phones, stereo systems, and all the other highly complex black boxes that they own and use on a daily basis without even thinking about what's actually going on inside. They could be sold on Linux as "this thing you can put on your computer that will make viruses and other stuff go away", but will lose interest the moment people start talking about graphics chip sets and other technical details they have no interest in -- for most people, it either works on what they have, or it doesn't, and in the latter case, any interest they may have shown will evapourate.
"missing features in trial software isn't all that unheard of. Think of it as a free trial with wireless networking disabled."
The original poster already covered this in one of his replies. Like most of today's computer owners, getting online is the major reason for using one, so a trial version of an OS he can't do that with is of no real use to him. Obviously, this isn't the case with everyone, but I'd be willing to bet quite a lot of money that at least 80% of those who are in the position to tr
"your "whole operating system" vs. "trial software" comparison is broken due to entirely different proportions which should never be compared."
Fair enough, you win if it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Now go and play with your straw men elsewhere,
"The reason iPod doesn't have FLAC is simple - it wasn't made by Apple and it doesn't have DRM.".
Apple must therefore have designed MP3, AIFF, and WAV formats too then, together with their subtle but effective COAPWYL ("Copy Onto Anything, Play Whenever You Like") DRM schemes.
Yeah. it's like having MS lean on your three-man software company by buying it for a few million greenies. Oh, woe is me, Micro$soft have used anti-competitive tactics on my poor little company, I'll now have to spend time crying into my cocktail on a beach in Barbados instead of writing C++ and answering phones. Ba$tards!
A wonderful post. Many thanks for your work on Amarok -- what you've written has definitely made me want to have a look at it.
"It's completely obvious and logical that a very limited piece of "trial software" is usually(!) much easier to get accustomed to than a full-blown, entirely new environment with entirely new features and capabilities. Nothing to see here, move along."
Read my original post again, because I said nothing about getting used to anything. I was replying to somebody who stated that another poster should solve his problems with _trying out Linux_ by going out and buying a different piece of hardware. Everything I have said was in that context, which you would know if you had actually read my (rather short) post instead of throwing a hissy-fit over one phrase deliberately taken out of context.
"Or, pray tell me: have you managed to grasp *all* of Windows' features, quirks and maintenance issues in 45 minutes instead of >= 10 years?"
Why do you assume I'm using Windows? I never stated that I was using any particular OS, so you are making completely unwarranted assumptions, as indeed seems to be your wont.
"Too many people all too easily forget that they have more than 10 years of experience with Windows-based systems and specific software there, but somehow always assume that checking out Linux should magically make everything work in a couple of hours..."
Which has nothing whatsoever to do with whether a user should be told to go out and buy different hardware. The original poster did not expect to know all about Linux by any magic, all he asked was that it work with his computer so he could try it out, and it would not.
"((IOW they're DEAD WRONG about judging platforms, but often don't know it)"
Just like you're dead wrong about the topic being discussed. IMO their ignorance is more understandable than yours, as all you had to do WAS READ A VERY SHORT POST.
"Sure, probably people don't care about Linux e.g. because with XP they now have a moderately well-working system"
With the original poster, it was a case of a working XP system versus a non.working Linux one. And he did care enough about Linux to want to test it, but Linux didn't allow him to do that.
"but that still doesn't change one iota the fact that your comparison comment was bunk"
When taken out of context like you did, it certainly was. In its context, it was however entirely appropriate. But then tilting at straw men seems to be preferable for you than actually making a useful contribution to what was being discussed.
" I did properly answer your comment anyway (it's absolutely not comparable, much higher functionality/scope than a single piece of software etc.)."
You did not answer it in the context of what I originally wrote, i.e. as regards telling somebody to go out and buy different hardware to make Linux work so that _they can see what it's like_. Your entire set of posts are simply responses to straw men of your own making, not the points that were being made. When you have an answer that's appropriate, then post it, but don't bother setting up any more straw men, as they only make your arguments look weak.
"OH MY FRIGGIN' GOD!!"
A typically hysterical Linuxite response...
"This is Linux, it's a WHOLE OPERATING SYSTEM WORLD with TENS OF GIGABYTES/THOUSANDS of freely available software packages and a certain amount of complexity that goes with such a hugely large offer, not your lame friggin' small trial/freeware text editor or photo management tool which has not the slightest amount of system requirements or dependencies on hardware device compatibility etc.."
And what value has any of this for someone whose hardware cannot be used with the base OS, especially when a good many of those open source applications (in fact, the majority of those that anybody actually uses) can also be run on commercial operating systems that do work with their hardware? So I will ask again, because for all the stated dumbness of my remark, you've still not answered it: from an end-user POV, what is so special about Linux that they should spend more time, effort, and money on it than any other piece of trial software?
"If people *really* thought of how stupid some Windows behaviour/risk is" blah, blah, open source, blah, blah, rinse, lather, repeat, ad infinitum. Get it into that tiny fragment of brain lodged somewhere in your skull: these arguments have been used for years, and nobody cares about them except _people who are already using Linux_. If you all stopped making excuses and blaming everyone else for the fact that you can't even give away what others are charging quite a lot for, then things might change for the better, but some of us have been waiting since Slackware was the only complete distro, and it still hasn't happened.
"Nobody cares about Ogg my ass! Plenty of "normal" people use it"
.DOC and .PPC files, i.e. without knowing or caring what it is because the OS combined with applications programs manages everything for them automatically. If you don't think that this is the case, then try asking a random iPod owner what the difference between AAC and MP4 is, or someone who uses Outlook everyday in their job about PPC files, what they're used for, and where Windows keeps them.
In the same way they use AAC, WMA, or for that matter
"more and more video games are starting to use Vorbis"
And games are written by -- yes, you've guessed it: PROGRAMMERS. Question of the day: what is the overall percentage of the computer-using public that develops games? How many of the people at whom such games are targeted know or care that Vorbis is being used? How many give a hoot about any of a game's file formats? In the sort of statistics that the company marketing a game will use for market research, all of these figures are close enough to zero that they will be lost in the error factor of their sampling methods, hence the fact that ads for games don't tend to harp on at length about what formats are used for each type of file.
The reality of of the matter is quite simply that people are largely oblivious of file formats in general, and not Ogg-Vorbis in particular, thus Windows' default view not showing file suffixes, but putting a little icon next to entries telling people what they're used for (music, video, WP document, etc.), together with any relevant metadata that describes them, and Apple using a similar system both in OS X and the iXXX apps which ship with it. People watch TV without knowing or caring about how the transmitter encodes sound, video, and colour information, and listen to FM radio without worrying about how the two stereo channels are encoded, so the fact that they also listen to music on their computers and portable players without even thinking about how the particular bit patterns that get turned into sound happen to be organised isn't particularly surprising.
"You paid $0 for the software"
And from his viewpoint that's precisely what it's worth. Sadly for desktop Linux, the vast majority of computer owners feel the same way.
"You can afford to get a new wireless card that works with said software"
As he already said, he simply wanted to try Linux out, so why should he have to spend money on different hardware to do so? What's so special about linux from an and-user POV that they should expend more time, effort, and money on it than any other piece of free trial software?
"mp3 players are usb mass storage and require no software...."
MP3 is a file format that has nothing to do with USB, and doesn't require a computer as an intermediate link. A system that used pre-recorded cassettes with MP3 files on them would be an MP3 player because it was _playing MP3 files_ -- that's what defines an MP3 player, not USB or any other interface. iPods are clearly capable of _playing MP3 files_, so this by definition makes them MP3 players.
"retards buy retarded devices i guess"
Retards also make stupid statements about MP3 players being something other than things that play MP3 files.
There were a number of other factors that helped Borland kill themselves besides the OWL-1 to OWL-II debacle:
1) Tools like Turbo-Assembler, which had previously been bundled with Borland C++, started to be sold separately instead, as had always been the case with Microsoft. This lowered the perceived value of the system in relation to its competitors.
2) Their compiler's code quality began to fall behind that of other vendors. This culminated in Borland C++ 5.X shipping with Intel's compiler in addition to Borland's, with them advising programmers to use theirs when fast compilation was required, but Intel's if there was a need for performance, thereby admitting that their own compiler was only really suitable for prototyping, not shipping commercial-quality software.
3) The long-awaited fully 32-bit Borland C++ 5 was so buggy as to be largely unusable in a practical sense. This was particularly noticeable in the project manager, which crashed so frequently that the IDE was relegated to being little more than a glorified text editor. A lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued, yet Borland took an inordinate amount of time to fix the various issues, which more or less forced people to look around for other options.
4) Loyalists who hung around for the promised "RAD C++ with Delphi-like productivity" were rewarded for their loyalty with what was effectively Delphi with a C++ compiler gaffer-taped to it via some proprietary extensions that weren't present in the Intel compiler which had shipped with BC++ 5, thereby forcing people to use the by now rather sad Borland compiler for shipping applications. It wasn't what customers either wanted or expected, and therefore generated lack-lustre sales which actually fell year-on-year as people realised that this was to be a permanent state of affairs, and not, as some initially thought, merely a stop-gap product that would eventually be replaced by a full C++ class library that didn't rely on weird extensions nobody else could be bothered to implement.
I won't even go into the various marketing missteps they made subsequent to Borland C++ 5, except to mention the fact that they managed to completely alienate virtually their entire traditional small business and individual programmer market by effectively saying "sod off, we're only interested in big corporate accounts, not pissy little quantities that dweebs buy".
So rather than committing seppuku in one go, Borland's case was actually one of deliberately submitting themselves to death by a thousand small cuts.
"Maybe I wasn't clear, so I'll try again... Standard notation records pitch, tablature records position."
You were perfectly clear the first time -- reiterating a wrong statement does not make it right.
"This is correct, but that doesn't mean fingering and transposition are the same thing. Transposing is another one of those things a musician is expected to know how to do -- and depending on your focus, you may be expected to memorize the natural key and range of every instrument in an orchestra. Regardless of where concert C is, the notes still represent a pitch. Fingering is a different story."
A transposing instrument is not one whose player has to mentally transpose things, but one whose score is transposed into a different key from the one played by C pitched instruments. Consider for example a work whose true key is C major: those playing Bb instruments will read from a score written in D, Eb instruments from one in A (they usualy, but not always, score these down rather than up because the Eb family tends to be high-pitched), and A instruments will have a score written in C#. This score transposition is intended to ensure that the player can use the same fingering for each instrument in a particular family, so a clarinet player who is has to switch between a Bb clarinet and an A clarinet in a particular piece of music (because each instrument has a distinct tone) will have this reflected by a score whose key changes (assuming again a C major piece) from D to C#, thus allowing him or her to use exactly the same finger positions on both instruments to produce what in actual pitch terms is C major scale.
"I really hope the keyboard tab thing is a mistake. Piano is probably the most important instrument for a musician to learn, and playing from tabs is hardly learning. I can't even imagine how you would notate something like this in tab -- the closest I've seen is the piano roll."
Keyboard tab is a little picture of a small part of a keyboard with black dots on various keys to represent chords. The only place I've seen it used is as a teaching aid in books showing how to play things such as modal Jazz, where chords such as 9ths and 13ths are commonly used; it tends to sit under a piano score rather than taking the place of one, and helps students cope with the fact that Modal Jazz is one of those forms that looks very horrible indeed when written out because (a) it tends to be harmonically, melodically, and rhythmically complex, and (b) the use of a 9 note diminished scale means that key signatures have no real meaning.
"standard notation is, strictly speaking, pitch. Here's why: if a trumpet player hands me a score for trumpet, I can play it on guitar from the sheet music, even though I have no idea how the trumpet is fingered."
But you won't be playing the same notes when reading that score, because you will play a C when reading a C, while your trumpet player will play a Bb or Eb, depending on the instrument, when reading the same note. One or the other will therefore have to actually play in a different key from what is written, thereby proving that written notes do not represent pitch any more than guitar or keyboard tab does.
"If that work was written in tab, however, my horn player can't"
That's merely due to the fact that he hasn't learned to read it, not because it would be impossible for him to do so. In my previous career as a session keyboard player, I had to read guitar tab as a matter of necessity, and can therefore play from it just as easily as any other form of commonly accepted notation (I also learned to read guitarist's finger positions on a fret-board as a consequence, which turned out to be very useful indeed!). My ability to read guitar tab obviously isn't a case of positional information, because a keyboard has no positional equivalence to a guitar, so in my case it is purely a form of notation that I used to play notes with, as is the case with standard notation.
"Do you see the difference now?"
No, I do not. Either n
"Most people think Windows XP Home Edition costs less than $100. In fact, that's the price of the upgrade only. The full version costs $200. Similarly, the full Proffesional Edition"
Wow, you're right. And MS were surprised that they didn't sell as many boxed editions as they thought? At that price, the only surprising thing is that they sold any! BTW, a quick cruise around various web sites reveals that it's even more expensive in many other countries, so MS shouldn't act so shocked when people pirate it, especially when the hardware it runs on can be had so cheaply nowadays.
"Similarly, the full Proffesional Edition cost more than most people think."
Yes, but it's a relative bargain at only $100 more than the cruddy Home Edition. I can't imagine why anybody would bother paying $199 for that when they can have Pro for an extra $100.
"In order to legaly put Windows on your Mac, you're going to need the full version of one of these products."
Indeed. The upgrade no doubt checks for the presence of a qualifying MS product, and these can't be installed on a Mac even if you happen to have a CD of (for example) Win98 lying around. Furthermore, the Mac's insistence on a version of XP with SP2 means that most of the older sealed boxed sets or OEM versions being sold on Amazon and EBay for well under $100 can't be used either.
"If Microsoft has significan't better pricing with Vista than with XP, this will be cheaper"
I doubt that this will be the case, as the full version of Windows-98 was pretty much the same price as XP Home, so it's likely that they'll continue this with Vista, although the Home Basic edition may be a little cheaper due to the fact that it has even less features than XP Home. Or rather, one can hope that this might be the case!
"Vista full version = $200"
It is very probable that the low-end Dells will ship with the Home Basic edition of Vista, which won't cost anything near $200 (MS may do some stupid things, but they aren't suicidal enough to charge the same price for a crippled "idiots only" version of Vista as they now do for XP Professional!).
"From my understanding, once you change a couple of "riffs" in the song, it becomes a different song and therefore is not subject to copyright."
Your understanding is wrong. A plaintiff will win in court if a song has certain specific similarities to his or her original -- it does not have to be identical. If changing a couple of riffs here and there was enough, jazz players (and more importantly, their recording / publishing companies) would not have attributed their often substantially altered renditions of various works to the original authors.
"It's major advantage is that it records pitch, not position."
This is completely wrong. A large class of blown instruments (i.e. most woodwinds and brass) are termed "transposing instruments" because what is written as a "C" comes out as Bb, A, or Eb (depending on the particular instrument). Transposing the score to an instrument's "natural key" in this way allows a clarinet player for example to use the same fingering on instruments pitched at A. Bb, C, and Eb, whereas having them work with a score where a written middle C would equate to the key a piano player calls "middle C" would require them to learn completely separate sets of fingering for each differently pitched instrument.
Standard notation is thus every bit as positional as guitar or keyboard tab, because both contain a set of instructions telling musicians to make various physical movements that will produce a certain pitch, and not a representation of the pitch itself.
They haven't had anything like as much luck killing entrenched hardware, though. Nintendo and Sony are sill in the console business, 90% of mobile phones use a non-MS OS despite several years of marketing campaigns, few set-top boxes run MS software, and they only won the PDA OS market after it had been made obsolete by other technology, and thus became not only irrelevant, but also virtually non-existent as a source of income.
Like many monopolies, Microsoft do not do particularly well in areas where their products are forced to compete on their merits.
OK, fair enough. It is though a shame from a historic viewpoint that IBM didn't use a 68000 instead of the 8086 family, which were by far the worst of the 16-bit batch in terms of both performance and architecture. Anybody who had to program in the "bad old days" of DOS will remember various horrid hardware and software hacks that were used to try and get around the limitations imposed by a 1MB address space whose top 360K was directly mapped to hardware, and an architecture which divided that limited space into 64K chunks. Those who also programmed on the Mac, Amiga, or Atari ST will also remember how wonderful it felt to work with a CPU that was not only free from those limitations, but also had a largely orthogonal instruction set that had been designed instead of feeling like something cobbled together with bits left over from the 8080 project.
Some of those who are too young to remember the days before IBM launched their PC may think that it had some sort of technical merit which allowed it to smash the competition, yet the fact of the matter is that it was actually slower than most 8 bit systems, had notably inferior graphics and sound capabilities to home computers that cost a fifth as much, and was totally smashed in every respect by any of the 68000-based computers that were launched more or less concurrently with it. Of course, this was quite usual with IBM kit of all sizes, which had constantly been outstripped both technically and on price by competitors, yet still managed to gain and hold 90% of the entire computing industry until the end of the 1980s. The IBM PC could therefore have used a 4004 and still become the dominant platform, because the executives who gave large sums of money to IBM never had to use computers themselves, and therefore didn't care about details like technical specifications, which they didn't understand anyway: if the IBM salesman said it would do what they wanted, then it would be bought, and using it then became Somebody Else's Problem.
"I doubt IBM would have selected it even had it been available because of second source issues."
There were actually less second source issues than was the case with the 8088, because the Z8000 was made by Zilog, Hitachi, and AMD (I know of these ones, but there may have been others as well). IBM could also have licensed it quite easily and manufactured it themselves if they'd wanted to, but it wasn't available in commercial quantities when they were designing the original PC, and even if it had been, no version with an 8-bit data bus existed because Zilog didn't reckon that anybody would want a 16-bit CPU that wasn't a 16-bit CPU!
"Besides the technical reasons I wonder if IBM had problems dealing with Motorola in other ways."
I'm confused now: AFAIK Motorola didn't sell the Z8000.